BEIJING, Sept. 24 (Xinhua) -- From an initial vision to the routine operation of China's space station and the steady advance of crewed lunar exploration, China's space program has blazed a new "Long March" with no precedent.
What has enabled Chinese space professionals to walk this path with steady steps and achieve one milestone after another is rigor and innovation.
In the eyes of He Pengju, a technical chief at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, this rigorous, innovative approach enabled them to complete China's first-ever emergency launch mission in the history of its manned space program.
Speaking at a press conference recently held by the State Council Information Office, he reviewed the emergency launch of the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft last November.
Before Shenzhou-20's scheduled return on Nov. 5, tiny cracks were found in the viewport window of the spacecraft's return capsule, most likely due to an impact with space debris.
Postponed until Nov. 14, the return saw the three Shenzhou-20 astronauts safely home aboard Shenzhou-21. China launched Shenzhou-22 on Nov. 25 to act as the return vehicle for the Shenzhou-21 crew.
From the discovery of the anomaly to the emergency launch of Shenzhou-22, the entire process took only 20 days.
"At the very beginning of the space station's construction, we established a 'rolling backup' strategy, with one combination of a spaceship and rocket assigned for launch and another combination as backup," he said.
"Once this special situation came up, we ran ground simulations and verification assessments to determine the worst-case impact," he said. With that, all major systems, coordinated under one mission headquarters, worked as one and moved through the entire process -- risk assessment, plan formation, emergency launch.
"The whole process was flawless," he added.
"Even with ten thousand successes, a single hidden danger can reduce all efforts to zero. For space workers, there are only two options: 100 points or zero," said Du Changshuai, an associate researcher at the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
During the construction of China's space station, the system testing specifications Du helped draft stacked more than one meter high, with thousands of parameters to check one by one.
"Even a tiny mistake is unacceptable," Du said.
While precision ensures smooth construction, innovation has allowed Du to give wings to various scientific experiments and lift them into orbit. At the press conference, he showed a special photo: two mice floating and moving in an experimental unit aboard the space station.
Less than a year ago, four pre-screened, trained mice arrived at China's space station, living in an automatically climate-controlled habitat with Earth-like day-night lighting. Fed custom-formulated food, they returned safely after 14 days in orbit. One of them later gave birth to nine pups.
"China's space station has now entered the application and development phase. My team and I have led the implementation of around 200 space science experiment projects of this kind and produced a number of important scientific and application results," Du said.
China's innovative space professionals are targeting the moon, some 380,000 km away. At the press conference, Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut in space, laid out the crewed lunar roadmap.
Two rockets will send up the Mengzhou crewed spaceship and Lanyue lunar lander, which will dock in lunar orbit. Astronauts will board the lander to land on the moon.
After surface tasks, they will blast off to re-dock in lunar orbit and head home on Mengzhou.
The Earth-Moon round trip, rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit, and precise lunar landing and liftoff must all be flawless, because at that distance, many operations have no backup or rescue, Yang said.
China aims for a crewed lunar landing by 2030. Core flight hardware -- the Long March-10 carrier rocket, Mengzhou crewed spacecraft and Lanyue lunar lander -- is progressing steadily.
Multiple critical tests have been finished. They include Mengzhou spacecraft's zero-height abort and maximum dynamic pressure escape tests, the Lanyue lunar lander's landing and takeoff test, plus the static fire test and the low-altitude demonstration and validation test for the Long March-10 rocket system.
Long Lehao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a carrier rocket expert at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, noted China's Long March rockets will pursue higher lift capacity, larger payloads, airline-style transportation and intelligent technologies. "In the future, we will also develop suborbital vehicles, trying to let ordinary people experience about 10 to 15 minutes of temporary weightlessness."
"The 'Long March' of China's space endeavor is always ongoing," Long said. In 1966, Qian Xuesen, a pioneer of China's space program, suggested naming the country's carrier rockets "Long March."
The name symbolizes that developing Chinese carrier rockets is itself a new Long March toward the sea of stars, which will surely end in glory despite challenges, he added. ■
