Red Dragon Rising

China is quickly and quietly becoming a dominant space power. Ash Dove-Jay explores what the Chinese have already achieved, what do they plan to do, and what distinguishes them from other spacefaring nations.

- Dr Ash Dove-Jay 

Next year, the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) marks its 25th anniversary. Since 1993 it has matured at an incredible pace. In terms of its breadth and depth of capabilities, CNSA already rivals ESA and is perhaps a decade behind NASA, entities that were established 42 and 60 years ago respectively.

The backbone of CNSA is its main contractor, the state-owned Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). CASC has revenues in excess of £34 billion, nearly 200,000 employees, and is predominately focused on space engineering in one form or another. To give a sense of scale, that is equivalent to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman combined.

Over the past decade, CNSA and CASC have successfully launched more than 150 orbital  rockets, which carried around 200 spacecraft and satellites. Two of the spacecraft launched were Tiangong-1 and 2 (Heavenly Palace 1 and 2), small test-bed space stations that demonstrated a suite of technologies and capabilities, and hosted three of the five manned space missions launched. Three of the spacecraft launched were their Chang’e family of lunar probes. Chang’e-3 dispensed a lander and the very successful Yutu (Jade Rabbit) lunar rover, and Chang’e-2 went on deeper into space to conduct a flyby mission, passing within 3km of the 9.5km-wide asteroid 4179 Toutatis.

China has also brought online major space based infrastructure, including satellite television, weather forecasting and – most notably – its own GPS service using the BeiDou navigation satellite system. Though originally looking to cooperate with Europe on the Galileo satellite navigation programme, China, dissatisfied with its level of involvement, in 2006 decided to develop its own system independently.