The BBC’s Laura Bicker sees the Shenzhou 19 spacecraft take off, as China chases its dreams of space dominance.
The ground vibrates beneath us as soon as the countdown ends and the spacecraft takes to the skies. Flames shoot out of the rocket launcher lighting up the Gobi Desert, which is then filled with a deafening roar.
Just two years ago, President Xi Jinping declared that "to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream”.Earlier this year, Nasa chief Bill Nelson said the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to the Moon, where he fears Beijing wants to stake territorial claims.EFE'Dreams that spark glory'
The brass band strikes up Ode to the Motherland as young children, kept up late for the occasion, their cheeks adorned with the Chinese flag, all shout in full song.The pilot of this mission, Cai Xuzhe, is a veteran but he’s travelling with a new generation of Chinese-trained taikonauts born in 1990 – including China’s first female space engineer, Wang Haoze.
The message is clear: this is a new generation of space travellers and an investment in the country’s future. In 2021, China safely landed a spacecraft on Mars and released its Zhurong rover – becoming just the second nation to do so.In August it launched the first 18 of what it hopes will eventually be a constellation of 14,000 satellites providing broadband internet coverage from space, which it hopes will one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink.
He claimed that since 2018, China has tripled the amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites it has in orbit, building a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and target United States and allied military capabilities”.China’s space exploration is a “collective mission for humanity”, says Li Yingliang, director of the general technology bureau of China’s Manned Space Agency, dismissing US concerns as “unnecessary”.
Estimates for the value of all this vary wildly, from billions to quadrillions. So it’s easy to see why some see the Moon as a place to make lots of money. However, it’s also important to note that this would be a very long-term investment - and the tech needed to extract and return these lunar resources is some way off,Chinese experts at the launch centre were keen to point out the benefits of Beijing’s space station experiments.
“The technology is complex, there's a tight schedule, and there are a lot of challenges,” said Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency.
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