China has been fanning its ambition of reaching the stars as of late. The latest news from the Chinese administration reveals their mission to the stars to watch for stellar events such as black holes colliding and solar storms emitting blasts.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has said that they have plans to put up four satellites in space, with the first one to launch in 2020. Science Mag says that this is also dependent on four previous successful missions that proved China can create successful studies in space. These missions will focus on studying events happening in space, even ones that happened millions of years ago.
Xin Wu, a Swiss physicist who was born in China, said that it's impressive how far China has come, given that they've only started sending missions 10 years ago. However, there remains a stigma-a scratch, technically-that the CAS needs to solve. It's a big country, he pointed out, and it's only natural for such a big country to have so many ideas of what to look for in space and missions that they need to finish.
This justifies the reason why China should have a working space program. Forbes points out news coming from the Xinhua news agency that reveals how China plans to develop their space program. According to the news agency, Beijing has its sights set on creating a Space Launch System (SLS) similar to what NASA already has. Depending on how far along the space program develops, they plan to use it for more ambitious missions, such as being the first country to put a man on Mars.
The SLS is a rather important undertaking. It is not designed for low-orbit missions; rather, it is aimed at developing multi-stage rockets to carry personnel and objects for deep space missions. This could range from visiting other planets in our local Solar System through unmanned probes, the oft-mentioned Mars mission, as well as creating and putting up space stations orbiting planets other than Earth.
Previous successful missions include the Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE). It was a joint mission that China created in collaboration with other space agencies. China plans to get these missions going into the area where they will finally be able to land probes on other solar bodies at will. If all goes according to plan, China's space programs might very well venture into making science fiction science fact.
