China’s space effort undergoing a sea change

Rise of the space navy
Enter the oceangoing barge method. In their exhaustive study of overseas space programs for lessons they could use themselves, Chinese space experts no doubt noticed that, in the 1960s, barge transport was the key to moving Saturn rocket components from coastal factories to coastal launch sites in the United States. These facilities were located and constructed from the start to enable this method.

Russia, on the other hand, used a land-locked spaceport in the Kazakh desert. Rocket segments for small and medium-class rockets could be (and still are) transported by rail, but when Moscow built its superboosters, first for the Cold War moon race and later for its Buran shuttle, it had to build at the launch site an array of factories and an entire city to support the workers and their families, at immense cost.

Air transport, the key to moving NASA’s space shuttles from their factory and, later, from contingency landing fields back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, was never a serious option for the Russians. Soviet engineers were barely able to move their hollow Buran fuselages and fuel tanks atop a converted bomber, but they didn’t own anything like the Boeing 747 transports for carrying a fully assembled shuttle — at least not until the very end of the program’s development, when it was too late.

China owns some 747s, but the blow to national pride of using a foreign-built plane to carry their country’s most advanced space hardware would probably be too great. Besides, there isn’t a 747-capable airfield close enough to the planned Hainan Island launch site.

So the connections between the new Long March 5, the new Hainan Island space base and the new requirement for transporting much wider rocket stages than ever before make perfect sense. The booster, Chinese space officials have stated, will be commercially justified as a carrier for Chinese-built communications satellites that already are being offered on the world market. It will carry the planned Chinese small Mir-class space station, and the planned robot moon rovers and sampler missions planned for the middle of the next decade. It will also open the path for Chinese astronaut missions to the vicinity of the moon or even other more interesting locations far from Earth.

The barge system, meanwhile, will inaugurate a space booster infrastructure design that will allow even larger rockets to reliably be moved from factory to launch pad. If and when China decides to build a Long March 6 — the equivalent of the Saturn 5 moon rocket that would be needed to land its astronauts on the lunar surface in a time frame competitive with U.S. plans — the first thousand miles of that vehicle’s travel will be by humble barge.

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