A place for China’s mat in space

Is there really a new space race emerging between the United States and China? Jeff Foust reports on a new study that examines the Chinese historical record for insights on its civil space program.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Full article here:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1434/1

One interesting item among many: Mao wanted a Chinese satellite right after Sputnik 1 and
Explorer 1 and he wanted it to be bigger and better than either of his rivals.

"My Decade with Shenzhou"

by Morris Jones

August 3, 2009

SpaceDaily

2009 will mostly be remembered by space enthusiasts as the 40th anniversary of the first Moonwalk. For me, there's a second but more personal anniversary. I'm celebrating ten years of watching China's exciting buy mysterious human spaceflight program. This has not been an easy or a conventional task, but it's certainly been rewarding. China launched its Shenzhou 1 spacecraft in 1999, publically kicking off a program that has preoccupied me ever since.

China has conducted its Shenzhou spaceflight program behind a fairly tight veil of secrecy, and has offered few glimpses of its work to the outside world. Older spacewatchers would remember the problems of watching the Soviet Union's space program in the 1960s, where successes would be triumphantly splashed across news headlines, and failures concealed. General details on spacecraft design and mission planning were scarce.

Plans for landing a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon were very well suppressed, and it took decades of research for the full story to be unveiled. For someone like me, who missed the 1960s and the Moonlanding, watching China has given me a chance to experience the same excitement and frustrations as an earlier generation of spacewatchers.

I've published dozens of articles on the Shenzhou program in publications such as SpaceDaily, and other news sources. I've also fielded a lot of inquiries from other journalists bedeviled by the same problems I have experienced, namely, the lack of easy access to information and sources inside China.

Full article and a neat poster image here:

http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/08/morris-jones-and-chinese-space-efforts.html

Jones often had Chinese reporters calling him for information on their own space program.