The Chinese Zhurong rover, part of Tianwen-1, China’s first homegrown Red Planet mission, reached orbit around Mars in February. Zhurong separated from the Tianwen-1 orbiter on May 14 and landed on the vast Utopia Planitia plain a few hours later. This has only been the beginning.
China just revealed its roadmap for the nation’s upcoming manned missions to Mars.
While China’s plans also call for a permanent base on Mars, NASA, SpaceX, or another mainstream space power will likely get ahead of them. But the red planet will be very crowded soon and that’s generally good news.
Its goals are ambitious. China wants, in fact, to become a leading power in space. Now they want to get the first humans to Mars by 2033. At the moment, they are building their own space station to rival the ISS and launch a satellite system that will rival the US government’s GPS.
The main stage, also called the technology readiness phase, will feature robots designed to return samples from Mars and explore a base site for a future human installation on Mars. Then, a second stage will be in charge of sending humans to the planet, who will build a permanent base. Once this permanent base is completed, a third stage will see large-scale cargo fleets depart from Earth to Mars to seed and accelerate development projects on the red planet. The timeline for these and additional phases are 2033, 2035, 2037, 2041, 2043 and more , according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The announcement will intensify the space race between Washington and Beijing, especially in the immediate aftermath of a series of successful Chinese space missions, including one in which China became the only non-US country to successfully deploy a Martian rover in May and launch. three astronauts to their new space station, Tiangong.
The director of the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), Wang Xiaojun, announced the plans during a speech titled “The Space Transportation System of Human Exploration of Mars” , which took place at the Global Conference on Space Exploration (GLEX 2021).
China is considering using nuclear powered vehicles for human exploration missions to Mars, in addition to a “Sky Ladder” system, which is currently being investigated as a means of reducing the scale or cost of future missions to the Red Planet. What exactly is the Sky Ladder? A space elevator? It could be, but at the moment, it is an unclear project. The idea of building a vertical transport that connects the surface of a planet with orbital altitudes is not new and has always become a difficult development to achieve technologically.
Who will be the first to settle humans on Mars? We will have to be very aware of this new space race promoted by NASA, Space X and many other private aerospace actors.
