This chart shows a recent survey of satellites and space junk in low-earth
orbits listed by of a country responsible for creating it the third
country might be a surprise to you, China has left almost as much debris as
America and Russia despite having a much shorter history in space in fact most of
this was from just one missile test in 2007 when China fired a kinetic kill
vehicle that one of its own retired weather satellites. The missile hit at a
relative speed of about 8 km/s shattering the satellite into more than
900 large pieces and almost 35,000 small objects, many of these will remain in
orbit for decades or even centuries. Now the last time I mentioned China's 2007
missile test I got some flak in the comments for picking on China
so yes other nations also have done similar things and its legacy of space
junk is typical of early missions in many national space programs. In the I950's global powers faced the likelihood that below Earth orbit would
become the new battleground overhead and control of that space will be a deciding
factor in future wars. In 1958 Chairman Mao tse-tung announced a plan
to develop a space launch capability from a country's ballistic missile
program. However when relations between the
Soviet Union and China cooled in the late 1950s and early 60s the Russian
technical assistance also went away. Although the Chinese economy grew slowly
in the 60s and 70s they did become the fifth nation to independently develop
and launch their own satellite system with the long march one rocket in April
1970. Over the next two decades plans for manned space flight were put
on hold but the space launches continued to deploy mostly Chinese satellites in
fact today there have been 258 launches using the Long March family of rockets
with a success rate of 94.6%. It took until 1992 before the leadership
of a modernized china saw value in a space program
as a way to stimulate and demonstrate advances in engineering and science. In
1992 project 921 was approved its objective to establish a manned Chinese
presence in space the first step of a new program was to develop a human rated
capsule. 'Shenzhou' meaning divine vessel flew a successful unmanned test flight
in November 1999. Two years later 'Shenzhou 2' - carried animals on board to test
the life-support systems a monkey a dog a rabbit and some snails despite
setbacks progress on Shenzhou developed steadily and on October 15th 2003 Yang
Liwei a first Taikonaut traveled on board Shenzhou 5 making China the third
nation to independently carry a human into space. Now the Mandarin word for
space is taikong add the Western word naut and you have Taikonaut the
Chinese version of astronaut. Liwei completed 14 orbits of the earth in a
little over 21 hours celebrating by waving the flags of the People's
Republic of China and the United Nations to the onboard cameras the next phase of
project 921 was to establish a small space station. By 2011 for Chinese space
agency had constructed and prepared the eight and a half ton tiangong 1 or
'Heavenly Palace'. the Space Lab was capable of supporting three Taikonaut's
for scientific missions up to a few weeks. The interior was painted in two
colors to represent the sky and the ground helping the Taikonauts to
orientate themselves in microgravity. However the main purpose of a prototype
was as a target vehicle to test docking with the Shenzhou capsule
but while the Tiangong-1 was completing his final ground tests the
Chinese space agency faced a new problem. On August the 18th a Long March 2C
rocket suffered a failure during the second stage engine burn and it was lost.
If the same thing happened during the launch of a Tiangong-1 or a manned
mission it would be disastrous for the entire space program. Engineers hurriedly
made more than a 170 modifications
to the Long March 2 in just six weeks resulting in the new "FT-1" version which
was approved to carry China's first Space Lab. On September 29th 2011 heavenly
Palace successfully launched into its target orbit in June 2012 the first crew
of three Taikonauts arrived including China's first woman in space Lu Yang.
The Shenzhou 9 spacecraft docked successfully and remained at Tiangong-1
for 11 days. After another man visit in 2013
Tiangong-1 was put into sleep mode and its orbit has been gradually decaying
ever since. But it's almost time for the first 'Heavenly Palace' to come back down
to earth. In the early months of 2018 the inter-agency space debris Coordination
Committee will track the space labs reentry to further refine its prediction
of where it might end up. In September 2016 a second orbital lab Tiangong-2
launched from the Jing Quang Launch Center in the Gobi Desert to be joined a month
later by a two-man crew aboard at Shenzhou 11 with a similar size and
design to the first Heavenly Palace Tiangong-2 - was able to support Taikonauts
Jing Hipong and Chen Dong for 30 days. During this time they tested a
range of scientific instruments including the first ever cold atomic
clock experiment in space which operated at a fraction of degree above absolute
zero, so accurate but it only loses one second every billion years. As well as
setting up an independent manned space program China is also breaking new
ground with a serious high-tech moon Landers. On the 1st of December 2013 a
1200 kilogram Lander named Chang 3 launched on a mission to the moon. Five
days after a launch Chang 3 entered an orbit approaching a hundred kilometers
altitude above all in the lunar surface. After a second decelerating burn on the 14th
of December the lander descended to just a hundred meters altitude above the
Mare Imbrium, hovering in position whilst it's onboard cameras located
landing site. Executing a 12-minute landing sequence
Chang 3 touchdowned successfully, the first lunar soft landing in 37 years. But
the mission was far from over. Like the soviet Lunokhod rovers of the
early 1970s, chang 3 was equipped with a nuclear-powered heating unit to survive
the harsh lunar nights. As well as having an array of scientific
instruments the Chinese Lander also carried a 140 kilogram
Rover called Yutu which explored the volcanic crater near the landing site.
The rover was named by public poll in Chinese mythology,
Yutu was the pet rabbit of Chang the moon goddess so in the West we know the
rover as the Jade rabbit, moon rabbit or just rabbit. But this particular rabbit
came to a bit of a sticky intermittent end in January 2014 when it had a
"mechanical control abnormality" according to the chinese state media although many
in the West believe it fell victim to be highly unforgiving the lunar dust
jamming its mechanics. It intermittently communicated back again with earth up
until March 2015 when it finally fell silent. But China aims to go even further
in 2018 when the backup lander of a Chang 3 mission is scheduled to do a
touchdown on the far side of a moon as Chang 4. This will be an impressive
first, all the American and Soviet soft landings were executed in direct line of
sight with the earth. The proposed landing site is the 'South Pole-Aitken basin'
a candidate for the largest impact crater in the solar system with a diameter
of two and a half thousand kilometers. Here the Chinese Lander will be able to
examine 15 kilometers of exposed crust hopefully uncovering evidence to help us
understand the moon's violent past better. In 2016 China launched 22 rockets
that's more than the Russians and the same number as the US, it has plans for a
third space station and its own space telescope in the mid-2020s
with aims to put men on the moon by the mid 2030s, so it looks like NASA, ESA
and SpaceX will have some serious competition in the near
future. So thanks watching and this episode shirt was the Navy Paisley by
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