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The Tianhe-1 module, launched this week, is at the heart of what should be a three-part space station. On the surface, it looks pale compared to the 22-year-old ISS. The ISS is a behemoth the size of a football field weighing about 420 tons, and the much smaller T-shaped Chinese Space Station (CSS) will be only 80 to 100 tons, closer to the size and mass of Russia’s former Mir station. The Tianhe-1 module weighs just 22 tons and 16.6 meters. After 12 missions this year and the next to put it all together, the completed station will be approximately half the length of the ISS.
China is doing well with that. “We had no intention of competing with the ISS in terms of scale,” said Gu Yidong, chief scientist of China’s human exploration program. said Scientific American.
And that doesn’t mean the station won’t have usable space capacity. Tianhe will be the main residence for any astronauts on board, and the next two segments, Wentian and Mengtian, will support a large number of scientific experiments taking advantage of the station’s microgravity. They can study the dynamics of fluid dynamics and phase changes, for example, or the growth and evolution of organisms.
Inside the station there will be 14 parking spaces the size of a refrigerator, and another 50 mooring points for experiments that can be mounted outside so that materials can be soaked into the void of space. China has already turned to international partners to request experiments. Five docking ports and numerous robotic arms will ensure safe visits to other spacecraft and establish the possibility of enlarging the station itself.
Perhaps most excitingly, the station will play an important role in helping China deploy and operate a new space telescope, the Xuntian, as opposed to NASA’s old Hubble Space Telescope, which has 300 times the field of view and a similar resolution. It will make observations in ultraviolet and spectacular light, doing research related to dark matter and dark energy, cosmology, galactic evolution, and the detection of nearby objects. Launched in 2024, Xuntian will be able to dock with CSS to facilitate repair and maintenance.
In addition, the station could act as a platform for testing technologies that will be essential to maintaining its long-term presence on the moon and Mars one day. These include life support and life support systems, protection from solar energy and the impacts of radiation and micrometeorites.
All of this is neat, but as Lincoln Hines of Cornell University points out, the real goal of the station seems to be prestige, to position China within an exclusive club of space powers that works at a continuous advanced position in orbit, pushing nationalist support within its borders. “There’s definitely a lot of people in the Chinese scientific community who are really happy with what they can do with CSS,” Hines says. “But to support the central government’s ambitious project, it is a very strong symbol, which allows us to tell China’s people, ‘We are technologically strong and we can compete with the United States.'”
And it also puts China closer to competing with the US at “soft power”. The U.S. is the main financier of the ISS, an incredibly expensive public good that benefits the world. It helps to carry out interesting science and technology experiments, but the station’s greatest influence has undoubtedly come from being a beacon of international cooperation.
We can expect the CSS to give China the same diplomatic benefit, helping to strengthen the country’s ties with other nations, especially at a time when the country is undergoing a relatively tough scrutiny of human rights violations against Uyghurs, political dissidents and activists. Hong Kong democracy movement.
“China’s effort is new and intense,” Goswami says, while the future of the ISS is bleak. “It tells the world that China is competing in the U.S. openly for space leadership, and that it is a capable partner.”
Even if these potential benefits are never realized, it may not make much of a difference to China. Unlike U.S. public officials, the Chinese Communist Party does not have to justify its spending sheet to citizens.
“From my point of view, the first goal of the Chinese government is its survival,” Hines says. “And so these projects are very much aligned with these domestic interests, even if they don’t make much sense in broader geopolitical considerations or have many ways to make scientific contributions.”
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