China has bigger plans in the works for a spacecraft as it explores ideas on how to build one that is ten times the size of the International Space Station.
Every 92.2 minutes, 400 kilometres in the sky, there is a Chinese Space Station circumnavigating the earth marking Beijing's challenge to US domination of space. Over the last two decades, China has been on an overdrive to catch up with and overtake every other space-faring nation, which has seriously alarmed strategists in America.
The annual US national security report, released on April 9, 2021, devoted much space to how China is a threat to the US in space. The report said, Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.
20 days later, on April 29, China launched Tianhe aboard its massive heavy-lift Long March-5B rocket. Tianhe or 'Harmony of Heavens' is the core module of the space station, Tiangong, that China is building in low earth orbit (LEO) about 400 Kilometres above the surface of the planet.
The US security threat report had surmised that it expected a Chinese space station to be operational between 2022 and 2024. China proved the timeline wrong because the Space Station's core module is already up and running in 2021 itself. A powerful central computer is already processing data from experiments and beaming them back to Earth.
According to the South China Morning Post, the National Natural Science Foundation of China called on scientists to join a five-year project to study the mechanics of an “ultra-large spacecraft spanning kilometres” and that this spacecraft will be "a major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe and staying in long-term."
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