THE SEEDS MISSION

This was the last mission for some time. Rumors circulated in the late 1990s of a new version to come, the FSW 3 series, but this was complicated when China then announced its intention of flying a dedicated orbital mission to test improved varieties of grass, shrubs, and trees, which observers called the “seeds mission” for short. Wang Yusheng of CAST explained how the exposure of grasses to radiation could be used to develop different types of grasses – those that could spread quickly, or grow more slowly, or be capable of resisting harsh climatic conditions. Then, China announced plans to fly a silkworm experiment, contrived by Jingshan High School, Beijing, to follow the entire lifetime cycle of the silkworm from egg to adult in the course of a mission. The original aim was to compare the results with a similar experiment carried out on the last, lost flight of the American Columbia Space Shuttle. Silkworm experiments had been carried on 10 previous FSWs and Bions. Scientists found that, although weightlessness reduced the hatching rate, silkworms otherwise grew normally, produced better silk, and had better digestive ability than ground silkworms.

Already, some seeds experiments had been funded under what was called “project 863”, a project that was to subsequently reappear in other parts of the space program. Project 863, really a program rather than a project, was authorized in March 1986, hence the “3” and “86” designators. It was a horizontal program for scientific modernization in China, in turn a response to the Star Wars program announced by President Reagan in March 1983. Star Wars provoked a strong response in the Chinese engineering and scientific community, but the lesson the Chinese took from it was not that they should re-arm, but that they had fallen far behind the West in technology – a gap that must be closed once more. In 1986, space scientist Yang Yiachi and three colleagues wrote a letter to Deng Xiaoping later published in the Journal of the Chinese Academy of Science proposing a systematic approach to technological modernization. He accordingly directed the state council to respond. Gathering together 200 experts for four months, they produced An Outline for a National High Technology Planning, proposing a budget of ¥10m. The government agreed what was called the National High Technology Development Program, or project 863 for short, but not the budget, which it increased by three magnitudes to YlObn. It was a horizontal program with seven categories (biotechnology and life sciences, information, aerospace, laser technology, automa­tion, energy, and new materials), 15 themes, and 230 sub-categories (the European Union uses a similar model, called the Framework Program (FP) for research). Between 1986 and 2001, €780m was invested in the program in 5,200 individual projects. The idea was to fund small cutting-edge projects (e. g. digital mapping, internet libraries in Chinese) that could be applied across wide areas of the economy – indeed, it led to 2,000 new patents in the first 15 years. The program contributed to Chinese advances in a number of areas, such as computers, where China developed the fastest computer in the word, the Tianhe 1, able to carry out 2,507 trillion operations a second (2.507 petaFLOPS). Project 863 funded a series of studies, exploratory projects, and missions in the space program, seeds being one of the first. Responsible for space research in project 863 was Min Guirong (1933- ), an engineer involved in the design of both the first satellites and the subsequent FSW series.

After a seven-year gap, the FSW series resumed in November 2003 as FSW 3-1 (the title Jian Bing 4 was also given for the FSW 3 series). Its weight was 3,800 kg and it was launched by the Long March 2D from the pad adjacent to the one where, two weeks earlier, Yang Liwei had made history as China’s first astronaut. The cabin returned to the Earth with its payload on 21st November after 18 days of circling the

Earth. In charge of the FSW program at this stage was Tang Bochang. The next mission, FSW 3-2, flew for 27 days starting on 29th August 2004, the mission being for surveying and mapping, confirmed by its lower perigee of 165 km. This was actually an older version of the cabin and used the CZ-2C, not the more recent D, so it could also be categorized as the FSW 1-6. The equipment module, 2,500 kg, remained in orbit but, by early October, it was tumbling and fell out of orbit on 6th November.

Soon after its return, China launched FSW 3-3 on 27th September 2004 on the CZ-2D from Jiuquan for geological surveying and area mapping. It maneuvered to an unparalleled height in the series: 560 km. FSW 3-3 carried 57-kg experiments for boiling heat transfer, air bubbles, melt mass, and cell cultivation. The mission lasted 17 days, the cabin crashing into a villager’s home beside the market in Tianbeizi, Sichuan. The roof was wrecked and supporting pillars were brought to the ground, but the cabin itself was undamaged. At this stage, the Chinese used two additional designators for the FSW series, both Jian Bing 4 and its number in the overall program (the 20th recoverable satellite, FSW 20). The next mission followed on 2nd August 2005 on the CZ-2C from Jiuquan. Named FSW 3-4 or FSW 21, it returned after 27 days on 28th August, while the equipment module orbited until 16th October. It was most likely a close-look photographic mission [10].

Only nine hours after it came to rest, FSW 3-5 (also FSW 22) was launched on Long March 2D from Jiuquan into orbit of 203-298 km, 63°, 89.5 min. This meant that Xian control was preparing the new mission at the very time it was recovering its predecessor – an impressive demonstration of control abilities. Western observers

interpreted the back-to-back mission as part of a military reconnaissance program to obtain six weeks of continuous coverage of high-value targets under favorable lighting conditions [11]. This at last carried the long-announced “silkworm mission” of Beijing Junghan Middle School to follow the spinning and cocooning of the silkworm in orbit. The students found that orbiting silkworms had a shorter lifespan (eight days) than on the Earth (10 days), in line with earlier results. FSW 3-5 carried a fluid physics experiments to study the migration of injected single and double air bubbles in silicon oil. Platinum wires were used to boil liquids to test the efficiency of heat transfer. Although heating was not affected by microgravity, the pattern of bubbles was dramatically different, producing many continually forming tiny

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FSW experiment container. Courtesy: COSPAR China.

bubbles, the large ones staying on the surface. Three distinct types of bubbles were observed, some very small but coalescing into larger ones, enabhng a model of bubble development to be formulated differently from that on the Earth. Air bubbles injected into silicone oil tested the Marangoni theory that they would move into warmer water (they did). Liquids boiled more gently than on the ground and it was more difficult to know precisely when boiling takes place. In another biology experiment, bacterial cells were fed with glucose and hormones to test their consumption rates compared to ground samples [12]. The equipment module orbited until 16th October.