This week China launched a capsule that joined with its prototype space station already in orbit. It’s a small step in space, but what does it say about China’s larger intentions?
On Tuesday, Nov. 1., China launched the Shenzhou-8 space capsule into the same orbital plane as its Tiangong-1 prototype space station. Over the course of several Earth orbits, the capsule performed a rendezvous maneuver and slowly caught up to the space station. Eventually, when it got close enough, Shenzhou-8 made some final burns to precisely match its velocity and location with the Tiangong-1, and the two spacecraft docked, temporarily becoming one. It was the first successful space docking in China’s history. As milestones go, this could be seen as a small one. After all, China merely performed a feat that Americans achieved more than 45 years earlier (and its space station is about the size of the Salyut 1 Russia flew about 40 years ago). There was a key difference, though: While the first American docking was with a manned Gemini capsule and an unmanned Agena upper stage, the Chinese performed the entire operation with unmanned spacecraft—a feat that the U.S. had never actually performed until recently, and a tribute to the intervening decades of technological development. The question now is: What does China’s recent success say about its goals in space?
When NASA achieved its first orbital docking in 1966, it was a key demonstration needed to develop the confidence to later go to the moon. That’s because the Apollo mission required a similar rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit between the ascending lunar module and the orbiting command module in order to get the astronauts back home to earth.
