CHINA: Despite decades of failure and costly investment, China now seems on the verge of taking its place in space, writes Jasper Becker inBeijing
China hopes to crown its status as a growing technology giant this week by launching its first man into space, joining Russia and the US as members of an exclusive club established over 40 years by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
A taikongaut, as the Chinese call them, is expected to go into orbit about 200 km above Earth for less than 24 hours. China guards its space secrets closely, but the launch, from a site in Gansu near the Gobi desert, seems scheduled for Thursday or Friday, just after the annual plenary of the Communist Party's central committee.
For a leadership almost exclusively assembled from engineers, the cost of the launch will be justified by the surge of nationalistic pride that China, which repeatedly refused offers by Russia to put a man in space, will have trumped Japan, Europe and India by "putting the spam in the can".
China is also talking about putting a man on the moon by 2010 and establishing a space station of its own, or at least sharing the joint station operated by Russia and the US. It wants its own Hubble-like telescope and a skylab.
A successful launch will also be a triumph for the military. China's space programme is about the only successful part of the vast and costly military industrial complex which Chairman Mao created from the early 1960s and which at its Cold War peak employed 16 million people, including 2 million scientists.
They were part of a huge and misplaced effort to rival the technological achievements of the two superpowers; the result, however, was a string of costly failures which a half-starving nation could not afford.
China did manage to use Soviet blueprints to successfully test nuclear atomic and hydrogen bombs but it repeatedly failed to design and build its own aircraft or submarine force. The programme, which once sucked up a quarter of its GDP, created a string of white elephants, including nuclear-powered submarines and fighter jets which never worked.
As a result, China now spends tens of billions of dollars each year importing US and European passenger planes and Russian military aircraft, ships and submarines. Amid all these setbacks, it has nevertheless managed to build a competitive rocket and a satellite industry which has even been able to pay its own way.
The initial investment was huge. The country built three satellite launch centres, each in a remote and inaccessible area to shelter them in the event of invasion.
After overcoming severe logistical difficulties and cut off from the outside world, Chinese teams managed to launch their first satellite in 1971, which circled Earth broadcasting the Maoist anthem The East is Red. It caused a sensation. After launching recoverable capsules from 1974 to 1978, by 1979, it said it had set up a centre to prepare for a manned space flight centre.
Chinese rockets are largely based on designs captured by the Soviets during the second World War from German scientists who designed the V2 flying bombs.
Further know-how came when a prominent Chinese-American scientist, Qian Xuesen, and two others defected, taking with them tonnes of blueprints from the US missile programme.
When Washington and Beijing were an alliance against Moscow and the telecommunications industry was booming, US companies started using Chinese rockets to launch satellites.
Setbacks to the Challenger programme led to a shortage of available launches, but China managed to carry out 30 commercial launches, providing the funds to continue developing the programme while the rest of the Mao-era military industrial complex was broken up or closed down.
After 1989, when US opinion turned against China, the commercial launches came under scrutiny and were dogged by two major launch failures in 1995 and 1996. These demonstrated that China was unable to solve key technological problems.
The Long March rockets could not carry heavier multiple payloads or reliably place satellites in a geo-synchronous orbit.
As President Clinton's administration became more alarmed by its inability to curb China's exports of missile technology to North Korea, Pakistan and other countries, the US placed an embargo on further commercial satellite launches. Washington has also punished key Chinese companies with sanctions.
Two key US aerospace companies, Boeing and Hughes, were fined $32 million this year for helping China by analysing the failures and transferring technology on guidance systems, telemetry and aerodynamics.
All these difficulties, in addition to China's budgetary problems, have led some to question the merit of its space programme. China is struggling to finance the modernisation of its military and finds jobs for hundreds of thousands of soldiers and technicians as it closes bankrupt defence factories and sets about creating a modern slimmed-down military.
Just how much the space programme costs is kept secret, perhaps because the country still has hundreds of millions of people earning less than a dollar a day and often pleads poverty on healthcare and education.
Designing and building the larger rockets used to launch manned space capsules makes little economic sense as advances in chip technology make satellites ever smaller and cheaper.
The technologies used for space launch vehicles are the same as those used to build intercontinental rockets for the delivery of nuclear explosives, especially multiple warheads needed to defeat the missile defence system which the US is building.
While this is an argument for going ahead with the space mission, it also encourages the US to stop the transfer of dual-use technology needed to develop Chinese industry.
The US continues to bar China from participation in the space station project because of continuing violations of the Missile Technology Control Regime.
Instead China has turned to Russia for help. Since 1996, it has been sending taikongauts to train at a space centre outside Moscow and has built a copy at Jiuquan in Gansu province. It bought from Russia the technology needed to build the space capsule.
The manned space launch was originally scheduled for 2000 and has been repeatedly delayed, less for technical reasons than because of budgetary disputes. A cost-effective space programme needs a new space centre closer to the Equator and last year China finally decided to build one on Hainan Island.
The driving force behind the space programme is former President Jiang Zemin, a one-time electronics engineer, who is still head of the military. He has insisted that China needs to be in space to develop its telecommunications industry and keep up with advances, including geo-positioning systems, electronic surveillance, remote sensing - all technologies which have transformed civilian industries. Above all China wants the military technologies which the US military forces have used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jiang Zemin will certainly be there when the Shenzhou V space vessel blasts off next week.