China plans for space station with most powerful rocket launch

The Chinese National Space Administration ramped up its ambitions last weekend with a test of its most powerful rocket yet and a prototype crew capsule, which are both designed to service the nation’s future space station.

The Long March-7 rocket blasted off for the first time on Saturday from a new launch site in Wenchang in south China. In the future the medium-sized launch vehicle will propel the uncrewed Tianzhou cargo vehicle into orbit for resupply missions to the Chinese space station, but this time it carried a scaled-down version of its next-generation crew capsule.

Chinese astronauts currently ride Shenzhou capsules into orbit, a copy of the Russian Soyuz, but it is now developing a new craft capable of carrying larger crews and going further into space, to the moon and beyond. The prototype launched on Saturday is about half the size of the real thing.

“It was designed to collect aerodynamic and heat data for a re-entry capsule, to verify key technologies such as detachable thermal protection structure and lightweight metal materials manufacturing, and to carry out blackout telecommunication tests,” said the China Manned Space Engineering (CMSE) office in a statement.

The craft was in orbit for around 20 hours before returning via parachute to the Badain Jaran desert in Inner Mongolia. “The successful recovery of the scale model laid a solid foundation for the design and development of the next-generation manned spacecraft,” said CMSE. The Long-March 7 also delivered a number of experimental satellites into orbit.

China plans to launch its Tiangong-2 space lab later this year, before starting construction of a full-blown space station in 2018. The station is expected to be operational by the 2020s, and China says it will invite other nations to participate with astronauts and experiments.