THE EARLY FSW PROGRAM (FSW 0)

The first attempt to launch a recoverable Earth satellite on the Long March 2 took place on 5th November 1974 and was a disaster. The rocket had barely lifted off before it began to sway from side to side and had to be destroyed in a fireball by the

FSW being readied for launch at Jiuquan.

range safety officer. The wire from the gyro to the control system had fractured – so it was later determined – and the control system had no basis for stabilizing the rocket. A year-long campaign to drive up quality was so extensive that the improved rocket was given a new designation: the Long March 2C.

The second attempt was made on 26th November 1975, when the first FSW 0 was launched into orbit from Jiuquan. Seven seconds after lift-off, the rocket turned towards the south-east. After 130 sec, the first-stage engine shut down. The verniers on the second stage ignited, explosive bolts fired to separate the two stages, and the first stage fell to the ground over uninhabited parts of Gansu. The second stage lit up, while small verniers continued to fire for a further 64 sec as the rocket coasted upward towards an orbital insertion point at 179-km altitude, 1,800 km downrange.

Due to a loss of pressure of the gas orientation system, it was decided to bring the first FSW home after only three days. As retro-fire approached on the 47th orbit, helicopters were scrambled to watch the cabin come in. The return to the Earth was problematical, the cabin being badly burned and approaching far from the originally intended spot. Although observers had been scattered on the mountaintops of Sichuan, no one saw a thing but, in Guizhou, four coal miners at lunch in their canteen were startled to spot a red-hot ball falling from the sky and crashing into trees. They found a blackened hulk in a crater. One of them threw a stone at the smoldering object and it bounced off with a metallic clang. The miners called the authorities. FSW was way off course and the cabin was very badly charred, indications of a less-than-perfect re-entry – but China had succeeded in recovering a capsule at the first attempt, like the Soviet Union many years earlier (the US experienced a dozen failures).

The Chinese designated the second set of missions the FSW 1 series, so this series was retrospectively but oddly named the FSW 0 program, the individual missions being numbered 0-1, 0-2, 0-3, and so on. Following the re-entry problems experienced with FSW 0-1, the cabin was redesigned, which took a year. The heat shielding material XF was extended to those parts of the cabin that had been badly burnt on the first mission. The second mission, in December 1976, achieved the landing accuracy intended. At headquarters, a plotting map marked the projected descent point while loudspeakers relayed the latest reports. Four helicopters were scrambled. A sonic boom from the returning cabin rumbled through the valleys of Sichuan. Sharp skywatchers noticed a black dot hurtle in from the north-west, splitting in two. One was the discarded heat shield, which was eventually found beside a road. The other was the cabin. Once the timer activated the parachute, the cabin could be seen gently descending, ending up in a vegetable garden on the side of a hill. One of the four helicopters found a flat spot 100 m away. The crew jumped out, mounted guard, began inspection, and removed the precious film. The third mission of the recoverable FSW satellite took place in January 1978 and was also successful; the post-flight announcement confirmed that remote sensing tests had been carried out.

There was a gap of over four years before the fourth mission appeared, the principal innovation being that on-orbit lifetime was extended to five days and new charge-couple device cameras were mounted to test the possibihties of transmitting

FSW returning to the Earth, seen against the mountains of Sichuan.

FSW landed and turned on its side.

Retrieval by a Mil-type helicopter. Large crowds have gathered on the hillside.

data in real time. FSW 0-4 appeared in September 1982 and further missions followed in August 1983, September 1984, October 1985, October 1986, and August 1987 (FSW 0-9). The charge-couple device transmissions were declared to be successful. The October 1985 mission took part in a general territorial survey of the land mass of China. FSW 0-8 was distinguished by coming down in a small inland lake, thus making it the first splashdown in the Chinese space program, although the lake concerned seems to have been thankfully quite shallow. The 1984-86 missions were land surveys taking more than 3,000 pictures using wide-angle cameras. It is difficult to assess the quality of photographs returned to the Earth by the early FSW imaging systems. Although the Chinese have published photographs of China taken from space, the satelhtes concerned have never been identified and, in some cases, American pictures have been used. Years later, the Chinese claimed that the FSW series had returned good-quahty, broad-scale survey images that had made an important contribution to mapping, land use, forestry, water resources, and problems of soil erosion.

FSW 0-9, the last of the early series, broke new ground, being the first mission to fly microgravity experiments and biology tests. Seven materials processing experiments with gallium arsenide semiconductors were flown, for the first time. FSW 0-9 was also the first to fly a Western commercial payload, carrying two small (15-kg) microgravity experiments for the French company Matra. The experimental boxes were handed back to Matra 10 days after recovery: one of them involved the testing of food growth and algae in orbit. A Chinese microgravity experiment was

Larvae flown into space on FSW missions.

Silkworms – the fatter space ones compared to the Earth control specimens.

carried, involving the smelting and re-crystallization of alloys and semiconductors. It is not clear whether the final FSW had any remote sensing role at all or whether it was devoted entirely to microgravity experiments. In the course of 1987-88, no fewer than 144 microgravity experiments were carried out for China, the German space agency, DFVLR, now the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft und Raumfahrt), and the French company Matra [2]. Silkworms were carried into orbit in an experiment devised by Yang Tiande. The results were dramatic, with development of the embryo

two days more quickly than on the ground, a 50% reduction in hatching rates, the silkworms being 6% shorter, but the silk produced in orbit being longer, neater, and more reliable. Overall, the life cycle of the silkworm was two to three days faster in orbit. His experiment was repeated in 1992 on the longer mission of the Russian satellite Bion 10, which saw successful cocooning, evolution into moths, mating, and the laying of eggs, and on Bion 11. Cocoon weights were higher than the ground control sample. Seeds that took hits from cosmic rays grew faster and flowered earlier. Tomatoes had notable DNA mutation [3].