Space flight in service of science
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China Daily, September 30, 2011
We, 6.4 billion of us, are on a spaceship, and we have finite resources of fuel and water. We have to learn to live with this fact. Chinese leaders and decision-makers won't go into space, but observations from space, from Tiangong-1, will temper their judgments.
China's independent initiative will leapfrog technical, financial and legal difficulties that have hampered the International Space Station. Russia maintains niggling sovereignty over its bits of the station, and other countries have been in and out depending on budgets. The United States is without transport, and relies on Russia for shuttle service.
China has learnt from others' experiences and starts afresh with state of the art hardware that had not been invented when the International Space Station was designed. This brings us to the answer to "The Needham Question".
Joseph Needham was an accomplished British biochemist who by some fate was sent to China, where he was mesmerized by what China had achieved in science and technology, including invention of paper, moveable type, gunpowder, chinaware and the compass.
After uncovering and telling the West about China's amazing advances, Needham posed the obvious question, embarrassingly glaring in the days of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)'s disintegration, warlordism, Japanese aggression and civil war: "How come, if the Chinese are so smart, they didn't start the Industrial Revolution, but tiny puny England did?" This became "The Needham Question", not answered in his lifetime.
In the 21st century, Needham gets his answer. By 2000, China was two decades into annual 10 percent growth. In the next few years, it hosted the most extravagant Olympic Games, World Expo and became home to the world's fastest and best trains, super computers, and other bests.
Pentagon analysts are turning up their nose at China for buying a second-hand aircraft carrier, although the US has 11 and even some smaller countries have one or two each. Distressed at China's modernization of its military technology, these analysts have just issued a report. They may have read something sinister into Tiangong-1, too.
With their own cinema at the office, they can either go back to watching Chinese baddies in James Bond flicks, or take in the BBC documentary on The Planets, in which Charles "Pete" Conrad waxes lyrical on the romance of working in a space station for the advancement of science.
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