SCIO briefing on China's 1st National Day of Space Flight
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 23, 2016
Reuters:
Some people have criticized China's space program, saying it lacks transparency and might contain military implications. I wish to know how you would respond to such criticism. Also, I wonder if you would provide some details about China's annual budget for its space program.
Xu Dazhe:
China's development of its space program features openness, one of the country's five keywords in the principal ideas for development, as evidenced by our cooperation with many countries. Today, the government is holding such a press conference and I am here to answer your questions. This shows our open attitude. I just now briefed you on our plans for this year and for the next five years and ten years, telling the world such information. It's fair to say that China is becoming increasingly open, and its information increasingly transparent.
Space resources can serve national security and the economy, and therefore we integrate military and civil development into our strategy. We use space resources for preserving world peace and safeguarding China's national defense; this is an understandable pursuit. I think, on this subject, China is more and more open. I hope our friends in the United States will notice this so that we may cooperate with our American colleagues in developing astronautic technologies.
I noticed that the U.S. film "The Martian" has an imaginary scenario in which China and the United States jointly conduct a rescue mission on Mars, which shows that our American colleagues are also very keen on cooperating with us. But sadly, due to well-known reasons, obstacles still remain to our cooperation. The positive fact, however, is that we opened up a new dialogue mechanism last year, based on which we will continue our communication this year.
Speaking of the budget, China's budget for the space program is on par with its economic growth. In the latest NPC session, we announced the budget, too. Here, I can tell you, friends from the United States, that our budget is far smaller than that of the U.S. government, roughly 1/10 according to some American colleagues' analysis. The figure represents a certain degree of accuracy. That is all that I want to say. Thank you.
CCTV and CNTV:
In your briefing just now, we heard that China has formally approved its Mars exploration program. Would you please elaborate on some details? Also, since China has been very successful with its manned spacecrafts, lunar exploration flights, the Beidou sat-nav system and the Gaofen series earth surveillance satellites, I wish to know if there are new space projects to be accomplished during the 13th Five-Year Plan? Please tell us about them.
Xu Dazhe:
It has been approved to launch a Mars exploration satellite around 2020, the final year of the 13th Five-Year Plan. The probe is expected to orbit Mars, land and deploy a rover all in one mission. This is a very difficult task. Mars exploration is a major undertaking for space science and astronautics. Our Mars exploration mission was approved on Jan. 11 of this year. As the window of launch only appears once every 26 months, we are carefully making detailed plans so that we can carry out the mission in 2020, a window of opportunity.
This is a challenge for us, since only the United States has thus far both landed and conducted surface exploration on Mars successfully, and Russia has only successfully landed on Mars. We hope to complete the tasks in one mission, a fairly big leap I would say. Our Mars rover could study the soil, environment, atmosphere on Mars, and check the water on Mars, something we are highly concerned about. Studying these allows human beings to study themselves, including how life originated and what is the environment the Earth exists in. Mars is fairly close to our Earth in many aspects, because it has a certain thickness of atmosphere, but it is different from the Moon, so Mars exploration will represent China's deep space exploration in its truest meanings. Although our spacecraft have already flown into the deep space, deep space exploration cannot be a reality until we have accomplished Mars exploration.
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