[LINK] "Project 714 and Shuguang-1: The First Chinese Space Program"

[rfmcdonald]

As part of his fascinating False Steps blog describing space travel possibilities that never were, pauldrye blogs about the surprisingly precocious space program of the People's Republic of China. Had things been different, China might have launched astronauts into orbit three decades before it actually did.

The Chinese first planned to put up a satellite in 1959, but the usual delays pushed the date into the Sino-Soviet split and the USSR withdrew the technicians and plans the Chinese were relying on in June 1960. Nevertheless, the Chinese committed to an indigenous missile and space program and pushed on. By 1966 the first steps to a manned space flight had begun. China’s first suborbital animal test flights on top of a DF-2 ballistic missile were scheduled for May 1966 but that month marked the start of the Cultural Revolution. The Academy of Sciences was taken over by the Red Guards and outside of the ballistic missile program (which was protected by Zhou Enlai) rocketry research in China ground to a halt for two years.

In April 1968 the main scientists involved (particularly Qian Xuesen, the American-trained father of Chinese rocketry) had been rehabilitated and the manned space program reorganized under military control, which gave them a degree of cover from the Red Guards. In April 1970 China launched its first unmanned satellite, Dongfanghong-1 (“The East is Red-1”), and Mao Zedong publicly announced that China was working on a manned craft.

The manned program ultimately was aborted because it was a very complex program launched in the middle of the Cultural Revolution when China was still a very poor country.

The proximate cause of the program’s cancellation was the apparent closeness of the project to General Lin Biao. The anointed successor of Mao Zedong, he fell out of favour and then died in a plane crash under murky circumstances on September 13, 1971. The Chinese government announced that he had been involved in a plot against them, and they eventually came to the conclusion that Project 714 was the hub of the conspiracy (some of their evidence was the fact that 7-1-4 in Mandarin is a homophone for the words “Armed Uprising”). Though the space program supposedly continued through the rest of the decade, there’s no evidence that any progress was made after May 1972. Wang Xiji was targeted, but remained free to work on unmanned satellites; Xue Lun, head of the taikonaut group, was purged and the cadre of taikonauts was released back to their units. Mao apparently changed his mind about the manned space program too, and refused to give even minimal funds when asked for them.

More basically, Project 714’s problem was that it took place almost entirely within the Cultural Revolution—which makes it astonishing that it even got as far as it did. Scientists and engineers were at considerable risk of exile and imprisonment during the time period and universities were unable to train anyone, so skills were in short supply. As the program was officially secret, they were unable to gain official protection from any Politburo member and were a wide-open target.

China’s economy hit a nadir in the same time frame, and so money was an enormous issue too. In 1970 the entire Chinese GDP was about US$110 billion, and the Apollo program cost roughly US$2 billion per year at a time when the US economy ranged from six to nine times larger (and almost 40 times per capita). Even the USSR’s economy was about 40% the size of the US’s. There was no possible way the Chinese government could come up with those kinds of funds and there’s evidence that they didn’t try very hard. One source reports that the project headquarters had a grand total of one telephone.

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