CW.150.VIKING BOER – CHINA WATCH – China is Building A Massive Space Station

[VIKING BOER]

CW.150.VIKING BOER – CHINA WATCH – China is Building A Massive Space Station The Size Of A City

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China already has its own orbiting space station, but the country’s National Natural Science Foundation wants scientists to seriously consider what it would take to build an “ultra-large spacecraft spanning kilometers.”

The South China Morning Post reports that the proposal is one of ten research projects from the foundation’s mathematical and physical sciences department. Half of the proposals will be funded to the tune of $2.3 million a piece.

That’s obviously not enough yuan to actually build and send even a small part of a new space city to orbit; such an endeavor would likely require multiple orders of magnitude more funding. The International Space Station, which accommodates just a handful of humans, cost over $100 billion to build and operate for its first decade.
There’s also a civilian side to the space race. The U.S. is wary of China taking the lead in space exploration and commercial exploitation, and pioneering the technological and scientific advances that would put China ahead in power in space and in prestige down on Earth.
‘Palace in the Sky’officially the Tiangong space station (Chinese: ?????; pinyin: Tiangong kongjianzhàn), is a space station constructed by China and operated by China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) in low Earth orbit between 340 and 450 km (210 and 280 mi) above the surface. Being China’s first long-term space station and the core of the “Third Step” of the China Manned Space Program, it has a mass between 90 and 100 t (200,000 and 220,000 lb), roughly one-fifth the mass of the International Space Station and about the size of the decommissioned Russian Mir space station.

The construction of the station is based on the experience gained from its precursors, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 The first module, the Tianhe (“Harmony of the Heavens”) core module, was launched on 29 April 2021,[ followed by multiple crewed and uncrewed missions and two more laboratory cabin modules Wentian (“Quest for the Heavens”) launched on 24 July 2022 and Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”) launched on 31 October 2022. The research conducted on the station aims to improve researchers’ ability to conduct science experiments in space.
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