Follow
China continues to develop its space agency, building a spacecraft capable of performing lunar missions.
STATES CHRONICLE – China is currently working on developing an advanced spacecraft bound to perform lunar missions, to land on the moon and also to fly in low-Earth orbit. This is China’s audacious step into the mysteries of space and an infinite mass of unknown ready to be explored. Zhang Bainian, the spaceship engineer, noted that spacecraft would be built to be a recoverable one, having enough room for several astronauts.
Considering the fact that Zhang did not provide more data in the report published on March 7th by the Science and Technology Daily newspaper, his new project was compared to the one developed by the European Space Agency and NASA when building the Orion spaceship. The space agency hopes that the new spaceship Orion will be able to carry fly astronauts into space by 2023.
The Shenzhou spacecraft of China was used to develop six crewed missions and is based on the Soyuz spaceship of Russia, being capable of flying three astronauts in the re-entry module. When looking back, we realize that China launched its first man into space in 2003. Nevertheless, their space agency has registered tremendous progress since then.
During its recent crewed mission, two astronauts spent a month in space, aboard the Chinese space station. In five years, the Chinese space agency prepares a fully functioning and permanently crewed spacecraft which will be ready to undergo operations. Moreover, the spaceship may be used in lunar missions conducted by a crew of astronauts.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, claimed that China is finally one of the three great space powers when it comes to space travel. What is more, it also managed to be overcome Russia regarding the number of spaceship launches while it also equaled the US at 22. Up to now, Russia launched 17 spacecraft.
If SpaceX’s Falcon 9 fleet hadn’t been grounded, now the United States would have had more space missions. However, even if the Asian country remained behind for approximately forty years in the field of space missions with crafts manned by crews, Zhang promises that his country’s space agency is bound to launch soon a spaceship which will prove to be very competitive compared to Russia’s and the US’s spacecraft. In the meantime, China is working on a Red Planet mission. They plan to send a craft to Mars by July 2020.
Image source: wikipedia
