NEWSFOCUS In the hot seat. The crew of Shenzhou 9 prepares for China’s fi rst mission to dock spacecraft with astronauts aboard. A New Dawn for China’s Space Scientists China’s crewed space program has won admiration for the engineering mer governor Bo Xilai and the high-profi le on April 22, 2013 prowess on display earlier this week in the Shenzhou 9 mission. fl ight of blind activist Chen Guangcheng. For the party, the elegant pas de deux at 343 kilo- Upcoming science missions hope to steal some of the spotlight meters above Earth’s surface was a timely propaganda triumph. “China’s space pro- BEIJING—When Shenzhou 9 gently fi red its moment: Shenzhou’s former chief designer, gram gives the party legitimacy,” Cheng thrusters to pull to within several centime- Qi Faren. “I wasn’t nervous,” he claims. says. “The leaders can say, ‘Look what we ters of the orbiting Tiangong module on 24 Shenzhou’s fi rst fl ight in 1999, Qi says, was have done for the country.’ ” June, mission managers were on edge. For a far riskier roll of the dice. That landmark The engineering feat is indisputable. a fleeting moment, a question hung in the mission went well, as did the Shenzhou 9 “China is emerging as a world leader in www.sciencemag.org air: Would the astronauts succeed in China’s docking maneuvers, completing a milestone space,” says Mark Stokes, executive direc- fi rst attempt to manually dock the two space- on China’s road to a sustained human pres- tor of the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank craft, circling Earth at 7.8 kilometers per sec- ence in space. “It’s a huge step,” says Dean in Arlington, Virginia, that produced an ond? They’d performed the maneuver on the Cheng, an expert on China’s space program analysis of China’s space program last April ground, in a simulator, hundreds of times with the Heritage Foundation in Washing- for the U.S.-China Economic and Security before. This was the real test. The slightest ton, D.C. “Docking is essential to doing just Review Commission. SCIENCE miscalculation could have spelled disaster for about anything in space,” he says, including Soon, China’s basic researchers will take Downloaded from Shenzhou’s three-person crew, including the China’s plan to build a space station by 2020. a star turn. Over the next several years, the country’s fi rst female astronaut. No country China’s leaders had a lot riding on Shen- country plans to launch fi ve scientifi c mis- had lost someone in space—and China didn’t zhou 9, too. The Communist Party, which sions, including a dark-matter probe and an want to be the fi rst. is expected to begin a leadership transition attempt at long-distance quantum commu- One person with a big stake in the mis- this autumn, spent the fi rst half of 2012 in nication. Four more innovative missions are sion says he was not sweating out that tense damage-control mode over the fall of for- in the design stage, Science has learned: an CREDITS: (TOP) QIN XIANAN/COLOR CHINA PHOTO/AP IMAGES; (BOTTOMLEFT TO RIGHT) BETTMANN/ CORBIS/AP IMAGES; R. STONE/ MILESTONES 1955 1970 OF CHINA’S SPACE PROGRAM Space program founder Qian Xuesen returns Debut satellite Dongfanghong 1 broadcasts home to a hero’s welcome. “The East is Red.” 1630 29 JUNE 2012 VOL 336 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS NEWSFOCUS x-ray telescope to study black holes, a solar time,” says Qi, now a dean at Beijing Univer- imager that would swing high above and far sity of Aeronautics and Astronautics. China below the line of sight between Earth and the turned to the Soviet Union for help; hundreds sun, a space-based very-long-baseline inter- of engineers poured in. Key facilities were set ferometer (VLBI) tuned to long-millimeter up across the hinterlands to avoid offering fat wavelengths, and a four-satellite cluster to targets. But several months after embarking study coupling of the magnetosphere, iono- on this vast enterprise, China, strapped for sphere, and thermosphere. Scientific pay- cash, aborted its space program to focus on loads are being assembled for Tiangong 1 guided missiles. and for two more Tiangong modules, includ- Qian bided his time working on weap- ing a crewed space laboratory, which China ons. Then, in a report to top leaders in 1965, plans to launch in the next 3 years. And sci- Qian argued that China needed to reboot its entists are designing experiments for the space program because satellites were indis- future space station. pensable for military surveillance and com- It’s a new dawn for China’s space scien- munication. The government concurred and tists. For decades, they have been left in the revived its space program. By then, though, shadows by the generals and engineers who the Sino-Soviet split meant that China had run China’s space program. China’s sole ded- to go it alone. “They weren’t talking to any- icated science missions to date were Double one, not the Soviets, certainly not the Amer- Star, in which it teamed up with the Euro- icans,” Cheng says. That’s why, he says, pean Space Agency (ESA) from 2003 to “much of China’s space program is domesti- 2007 to study magnetic storms, and the ill- cally produced.” fated Mars probe Yinghuo-1, which failed to After a failed attempt in 1969, China on leave Earth orbit. 24 April 1970 put its fi rst satellite in orbit, on April 22, 2013 “When I look at astronomy textbooks, becoming only the fi fth country to do so. For none of the discoveries were made by people 1 month, Dongfanghong 1 took readings of working in China. I don’t see a single photo the ionosphere and transmitted data back to taken by a Chinese telescope. It’s very frus- Earth. In a patriotic touch, it broadcast the trating,” says Zhang Shuang-Nan, an astro- song “The East is Red,” for which it was physicist here at the Institute of High Energy named. “It was a simple satellite,” says Qi, Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences All systems go. Shenzhou 9 lifts off on 16 June. who served on the engineering team. But the (CAS). “We feel more and more pressure, not 1-meter-wide debutante, heavier than the fi rst just from the top, but also from the bottom, genius by his peers, Qian, known in the United satellites of the Soviet Union, United States, www.sciencemag.org to produce knowledge,” adds Wu Ji, direc- States by the older spelling of his name, Hsue- France, and Japan combined, made a power- tor general of CAS’s National Space Science Shen Tsien, fell victim to the Red Scare and in ful statement. Center (NSSC). With the raft of missions now 1950 was accused of being a Communist. The China then set its sights on a crewed in the works, they may end up not just revising United States revoked his security clearance program—but didn’t get very far. “There but rewriting textbooks. and—after 5 years of house arrest—exiled were some key technical problems beyond him to China. Qian returned home to a hero’s our ability at that time,” Qi says. In 1975, Rags to riches welcome and soon proposed that the young he recalls, “Premier Zhou Enlai convinced Downloaded from The visionary who set China’s sights on space nation start a missile program. us to not try to match the Soviet Union and also played a key role in the early days of the A year after a small team set to work, the U.S., and fi rst develop more satellites.” U.S. program. In the 1940s, Chinese-born Soviet Union shocked the world on 4 October China hatched plans for a new crewed pro- aeronautical engineer Qian Xuesen was one 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s gram in 1986. Work began in earnest in 1992, of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Labo- fi rst artifi cial satellite. China wanted one, too. the year that Qi succeeded Qian as China’s CREDITS: (TOP) ZZHANG LEI/COLOR CHINA/AP IMAGES AP PHOTO/XINHUA; (BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT) AP PHOTO/EUGENE HOSHIKO; (INSET) IGNAT SOLOVEY/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; AP PHOTO/ZHA CHUNMING CREDITS: (TOP) ZZHANG LEI/COLOR CHINA/AP IMAGES AP PHOTO/XINHUA; (BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT) AP PHOTO/EUGENE HOSHIKO; (INSET) IGNAT ratory in Pasadena, California. Considered a “However, we didn’t even have a rocket at that general spacecraft designer. Sanctions on 1999 2003 2003 Shenzhou 1 marks the start of the crewed Yang Liwei orbits Earth for 21 hours aboard Double Star is the fi rst bona fi de space space program. Shenzhou 5. science mission. www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 336 29 JUNE 2012 1631 Published by AAAS NEWSFOCUS Entangled Secret Messages From Space says, will also be a platform for fundamental experiments probing the nature SHANGHAI—Last summer, a stream of photons arced northwest across of entanglement, dismissed by Albert Einstein as “spooky action a distance,” Qinghai Lake—China’s biggest—traveling about 100 kilometers in the over unprecedented distances. If it succeeds, China intends to deploy a fl eet blink of an eye before impinging on a detector on the opposite shore. This of spacecraft that could make global quantum communication a reality. was no ordinary beam of light: The photons were entangled, meaning they Potential users would include commercial banks and China’s armed forces.