China Is Readying the Next Step in Manned Space Exploration

To go beyond Earth orbit in the future, and explore deep space with robotic spacecraft and with crews, China will need both a heavy lift rocket, and larger and more capable crew vehicles. A new series of Long March rockets is under development, and next month will see the first test flight of the medium-lift Long March 7. The Long March 7 is a medium-lift vehicle, which is needed to launch the upcoming Tianzhou unmanned cargo resupply ship, which will service the future space station.

The Long March 7 arrived Saturday at the new Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern Hainan province, reports Andrew Jones for GBTimes media company; that coastal location allows the new, larger rockets to be delivered for launch than can be accommodated by China’s railroads, he says.

China’s space engineers plan to make good use of the test flight, and use the opportunity to place a scaled-down version of a new reentry capsule for crewed spaceflight on the Long March 7 rocket. The new capsule is the first of two that are under development, with masses of 14 and 20 tons, as compared to the 8-ton Shenzhou capsule which so far has carried all Chinese astronauts into space. The smaller new vehicle will first be used for missions to transport crew or cargo to low Earth orbit. But both capsules are also being designed for deep space missions, potentially to the Moon, Lagrange Points, asteroids, and Mars.

The current generation Shenzhou manned spacecraft touch down on land. The new generation will be able to also be recovered at sea. They will include an antenna designed to allow radio communications with the craft during descent through the Earth’s atmosphere, when there is normally “radio silence,” or a
communications blackout.