China Moving Forward with Big Space Station Plans

Space travelers from around the globe recently got a firsthand sense of China's blossoming plans to explore Earth orbit and beyond.

At the 27th Planetary Congress of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), held in Beijing last month, China's space industry leaders extended an open invitation for other nations to take part in China's emerging space station program.

"We reserved a number of platforms that can be used for international cooperative projects in our future space station when we designed it," Yang Liwei, deputy director of China Manned Space Engineering and China's first astronaut, said at the event, which was held in China for the first time. "In addition to collaboration in applied experiments, we also designed adapters that can dock with other nations' spacecraft." [Read the latest news about China's space program]

China has initiated a multistep space station program, sending the Tiangong 1, its first space lab and still-operating spacecraft, into orbit in September 2011.

And the liftoff of China's Tiangong 2 space lab, scheduled for 2016, is intended to sharpen China's space station construction skills. A Shenzhou 11 crewed spacecraft and a Tianzhou 1 cargo spacecraft would then be launched to dock with that facility.

Yang told the ASE delegates that by about 2022, China's first space station would be fully operational.

Space travelers from around the world attended the event hosted by ASE, an international nonprofit professional and educational organization of nearly 400 astronauts from 35 nations. One of them was Charles Walker, the first industrial payload specialist that flew as a crew member on three space shuttle missions in the 1980s.

"The ASE Congress was very successful; the Chinese are energetic, welcoming, friendly and intent on exploring and developing space," Walker said.

The Chinese mythabout the beautiful young woman, Chang'e, and her jade rabbit, Yutu, going to the moon have made for a great connection with the Chinese people. All of China's lunar missions to date have been named for the Chang'e moon maiden. "They seem intent on lunar exploration and exploitation through some or all the scenarios of which we are familiar," Walker told Space.com.

And China is maintaining its momentum with missions to low-Earth orbit, Walker said. "Their human spaceflight program is maturing quickly and deliberately," he said.

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China Moving Forward with Big Space Station Plans