Saturday, April 25, 2015

A Look At How China's Space Program Began

Photo: The launch of Long March 3B Rocket, Xichang Satellite Center, China.Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/ AAxanderr

The Diplomat: The Humble Beginnings of China's Space Program

Plus, the PLAN’s birthday, China in the Middle East, and the truth about Hong Kong’s election plan. Friday China links.

In a fascinating piece yesterday, Xinhua traced the origins of China’s space program, an exercise inspired by the 45th anniversary of China’s first satellite launch. The Dongfanghong-1 was launched on April 24, 1970, the culmination of years of research – and far from the end of China’s fervent quest to prove itself worthy of membership in the “space club.”

The Xinhua piece emphasizes the hardships and obstacles facing China’s early aeronautics engineers. Wang Xiji recounted how, in an early attempt to design a sounding rocket, “researchers had to calculate their computations by hand or by abacus… The computing papers were stacked higher than their desks.” In addition to the difficulty of performing scientific tasks in primitive conditions, scientists also had to scramble to meet political requirements, such as figuring out how to have the satellite broadcast “The East Is Red” (or “Dongfang Hong,” a song praising Mao Zedong, and the source of the satellite’s name) and how to artificially inflate its size to make it visible from Earth. The scientists even had to get special permission from Premier Zhou Enlai to remove Mao badges from the satellite equipment when they discovered that the extra weight posed a problem.

WNU Editor: The Xinhua article (in English) is at the following link .... Xinhua Insight: How China joins space club? (Xinhua)

5 comments:

Unknown said...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119985.Thread_of_the_Silkworm

I have been meaning to read this book.


It should have some good information.

James said...

A little known fact of the Chinese space program development involves an (ahem) unknown mid level Soviet Foreign Office employee who was able to help the Chinese engineers get over their fears of wearing shorts and unusual colored socks in public. Since then chinese engineers have been seen everywhere; aero space symposiums, JPL laboratories, all you can eat buffets, and Polish neighborhood bowling alleys.

War News Updates Editor said...

Rumor has it that this unknown mid level Soviet Foreign Office employee did not only set the fashion trend for Chinese nerds and engineers that continues even to this day .... but his biggest impact was explaining to a groups of highly selected above-50 year old Chinese officials in the mid-1980s that if they really wanted to go all out in their choice of sock colors, they should take up the wonderful game of Golf .... a sport that they never heard of before, but were shocked when it was explained to them that the Japanese were always boasting that a Chinese par was actually 6 bogeys on a par-3 hole.

Since that revelation .... that unknown mid level Soviet Foreign Office employee's name is being cursed everyday on every golf course in China .... and beyond.

James said...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.......!
Oh, to be immortal!

James said...

Things are always just a little different in the Celestial Kingdom.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/04/23/chinese-government-says-please-stop-hiring-funeral-strippers/