CONCLUSIONS: SPACE SCIENCE IN PERSPECTIVE

Space science has not been a prominent aspect of the Chinese space program. The substituting of scientific instruments originally intended for the first Chinese satellite by a tape recorder playing “The East Is Red” was an indicator of things to come. The number of purely scientific satellites launched by China is small: Shi Jian 1, 2, 4, and 5, with some scientific instruments and experiments carried out on other spacecraft (e. g. the early communications satellites, Feng Yun). The Tianwen Weixing was canceled in 1984. Despite a lengthy campaign by the astronomical and astrophysics community, other scientific projects like the solar telescope and the x – ray telescope have had long gestation periods and, despite conception in the 1990s, have still to fly 20 years later. Clearly, science has found it difficult to fight its comer, even in a financial environment more stable than that of Russia, where space science suffered badly in the years of economic difficulty. The Tan Ce missions did give China a substantial scientific return, as well as international recognition, and may have provided the encouragement necessary to renew old and develop new missions, like the SST, the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope, Kuafu, and MIT. As we will see later, the government came to recognize the importance of rectifying the historic underinvestment in space science and set down fresh plans for more ambitious missions in space science (see Chapter 10). Some of these gaps were later made good by the use of the orbital module of the Shenzhou manned program to carry scientific packages – a role reviewed in the course of Chapter 8, as well as by the start of the lunar program in the early twenty-first century (Chapter 9).