THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 Y D5
Having already joined the up-
per ranks of spacefaring na-
tions, China is preparing to try
its next bold leap: launching
an orbiter, a lander and a rover
to Mars.
The mission — shadowing NASA’s Perse-
verance rover and the United Arab Emir-
ates’ Hope orbiter — lifted off on Thursday
and aims to place China where its Commu-
nist leadership has long wanted to be. China
is eager to show it can manage complex
interplanetary missions on its own; landing
on Mars is a difficult accomplishment that
only the United States and, briefly, the Sovi-
et Union have achieved before.
“We cannot lie in the cradle of Earth for-
ever,” Bao Weimin, a senior director at the
state-owned China Aerospace Science and
Technology Corporation, said on state tele-
vision recently, paraphrasing a Soviet
rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He
called the exploration of Mars “a manifesta-
tion of the country’s scientific and techno-
logical strength.”
For China, more than pride is on the line.
The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has made
space exploration a pillar of the country’s
development, with an assortment of mis-
sions planned through the middle of the
century, many involving human crews.
The mission is called Tianwen-1, or
“Questions to Heaven” after a classical Chi-
nese poem (also translated as “Heavenly
Questions”) from the 3rd century B.C. The
vessel, weighing more than five tons in all,
includes an orbiter that will circle the planet
for a Martian year — 687 days — and con-
duct its own scientific observations. It will
also serve as a relay for communications to
a lander and rover that two or three months
after arriving in orbit in February will try to
descend to the planet’s surface.
While the United States has reached all
these milestones, China is trying to do them
all at once. “Tianwen-1 is going to orbit, land
and release a rover all on the very first try,
and coordinate observations with an or-
biter,” four scientists involved in the pro-
gram wrote last week in the journal Nature
Astronomy. “No planetary missions have
ever been implemented in this way,” they
added. “If successful, it would signify a ma-
jor technical breakthrough.”
The orbiter will carry seven instruments,
including cameras, subsurface radar, a
spectrometer, a magnetometer and particle
analyzers for what they called “a global and
extensive survey of the entire planet.”
The lander — which, at 530 pounds, is
nearly twice the mass of the rovers China
sent to the moon — has six instruments that
it will employ over 90 days on the surface.
They include ground-penetrating radar to
study the planet’s geology and search for
potential underground reservoirs of ice — a
key to sustaining an extended human pres-
ence in space. The main candidate for a
landing site, the scientists said, is Utopia
Planitia, a 2,000-mile wide basin where
NASA’s Viking 2 landed in 1976.
Tianwen-1 is lifted off on Thursday from
the Wenchang Space Launch Center on
Hainan, the island off China’s southeastern
coast. The center, which launched its first
rocket in 2016, was selected to take advan-
tage of its comparatively lower latitude
than those of China’s other launch sites.
This will not be China’s first attempt to
travel to Mars. That one, in 2011, ended in
failure, though not of China’s own making. It
built an orbiter, Yinghuo-1, that was piggy-
backing on a Russian mission to Phobos, a
Martian moon, but the Russian rocket
stalled in low-Earth orbit, crippled by faulty
computer circuits. The two spacecraft even-
tually plunged back to Earth.
In the years that followed that setback,
China has racked up a number of impres-
sive spaceflight accomplishments. On three
occasions, China’s astronauts have docked
in orbit with space stations of the country’s
own construction. And twice it has landed
robotic rovers on the moon, with its latest
mission reaching the lunar far side, a feat
never before accomplished by any space
program. That rover continues to roam, and
its ground-penetrating radar has deepened
understanding of the lunar surface.
Namrata Goswami, an independent ana-
lyst and author of a forthcoming book,
“Great Power Competition in Outer Space,”
said that the Chinese were systematically
building strategic and logistical capabilities
in space with a geopolitical goal in mind.
Last month, for example, China launched
the last of the satellites needed to establish
a global positioning system, called Beidou,
which it plans to offer to countries as an al-
ternative to the American GPS and other
countries’ navigation systems. “The Com-
munist Party of China wants to prove to the
world that they are actually a legitimate al-
ternative to a U.S.-led space order,” she said.
Mr. Bao, from the China Aerospace Sci-
ence and Technology Corporation, even
floated the idea last year that China could
create an economic zone in space by the
middle of this century, one that could con-
tribute $10 trillion to the Chinese economy.In the nearer term, China plans to launch
another lunar lander at the end of the year,
which will return samples from the moon
for the first time since the Apollo missions,
and complete its third orbiting space station
as soon as 2022. It hopes to gather samples
for return to Earth from Mars by 2030 —
setting up a race with a joint project by
NASA and the European Space Agency
with the same goal.
“For the Chinese, space touches on all the
strands of comprehensive national power,”
said Dean Cheng, an expert on China’s
space program with the Heritage Founda-
tion in Washington, D.C.
The Mars mission could also be useful in
other geopolitical arenas.
The timing of the launch comes as China
is facing increasing international pressure
over its handling of a variety of issues. They
include the coronavirus pandemic, which
spread from Wuhan, a city of 11 million in
central China, early this year; the system-
atic and ongoing repression of Uighurs and
other Muslims in its Xinjiang province; and
the harsh crackdown on dissent in Hong
Kong, the semiautonomous territory whose
political and economic freedoms China
promised to respect until 2047.
A mission to Mars might seem like a gold-
en opportunity to change the topic. At the
same time, the country’s promotion of the
journey has been relatively restrained com-
pared with the fanfare of NASA missions.
That is in keeping with a tradition in China,
where its human space missions were
broadcast only a tape delay.
The space program remains closely
linked with China’s military, which leaves a
partial shroud of secrecy over the prepara-
tion and operational details of missions.
Fear of failure also remains a powerful fac-
tor in the management — and publicity — of
its space program. China’s previous leader,
Hu Jintao, ultimately wrapped himself in
the country’s successful astronaut mis-
sions, beginning in 2003, but Mr. Xi has been
far more careful with his public embrace of
the Mars mission. This is in contrast to the
way that the prime ministers of India and
Israel were both directly involved in those
countries’ moon landing attempts last year
— only to see them fail.
Still, the country recently broadcast its fi-
nal Beidou launch on national television,
though with a delay. As the launch ap-
proached, anticipation of the Mars mission
built in state media and online. The success
of China’s Mars mission depends on the
Long March 5, a launch system that suf-
fered a catastrophic failure in 2017, prompt-ing a two-year delay for redesign and test-
ing and pushing back other deep-space mis-
sions. The Long March 5 was successfully
launched again in December, clearing the
way for the Mars mission this month.
“There is a lot riding on this,” Mr. Cheng
said. “Failure is always a possibility, and the
Chinese themselves write about how space
is one of the most complex environments to
work in. But that does not mean they will
accept failure gracefully.”
The mission has already suffered the loss
of one of its architects, Wan Weixing, who
died in May before seeing the program
reach its climax. Mr. Wan, the chief scientist
for the Mars exploration program and one
of the co-authors listed on the Nature As-
tronomy article, was 61, according to China
Daily. No official cause of death was cited.
Only the Soviet Union and the United
States have managed to arrive in one piece
on Mars. The Soviet lander, the first,
touched down in 1971 but stopped communi-
cating almost immediately afterward.
While a number of similar missions by other
countries have failed, the United States has
managed five successful surface landings.
“The Chinese are acutely aware that a lot
of people think they are just repeating what
others have done in the past,” said Joan S.
Johnson-Freese, a professor of national se-
curity affairs at the United States Naval
War College. “So they are very careful to do
things that No. 1, get them in the record
books, like landing and the far side of the
moon and, No. 2, allow them to do science
that others countries are going to be inter-
ested in,” he said.
NASA’s experience allows it greater am-
bitions. The Perseverance rover, for in-
stance, will carry a helicopter, trying for the
first time to fly in the thin Martian atmos-
phere. “The United States is all about build-
ing a Mercedes,” Dr. Johnson-Freese said.
By contrast, she added, the Chinese pro-
gram, “is all about just running a Ford. They
don’t have a lot of bells and whistles.”
Still, for China, if all goes according to
plan, and Tianwen-1 arrives on Mars in Feb-
ruary, a stream of images from the planet
will at least compete with those coming
from Perseverance, which is scheduled to
land in February. That will be a publicity
coup in itself.
“China realizes that in the world of today
and the world of tomorrow, space is going to
play a critical role in how humanity organ-
izes itself,” she said, “and so they are look-
ing at all of their missions from that per-
spective.”China Is Aiming High, Too
One goal of the Tianwen-1 launch is to catch up with decades of American success on the red
planet, all in a single mission.
Claire Fu contributed research from Beijing.
China’s basic
program ‘is all
about just running a
Ford. They don’t
have a lot of bells
and whistles.’
JOAN S. JOHNSON-FREESE
UNITED STATES NAVAL
WAR COLLEGEBy STEVEN LEE MYERSOLIVER MUNDAY