A one-horse space race

In August, the entire Chinese population got very very excited about the Olympics. At the beginning of September they got pretty damned excited about the Paralympics. And now, just when you thought no further demonstrations of national excitement were possible without mass spontaneous combustion occurring, they’re getting excited all over again about China’s third-ever manned space mission, the Shengzhou 7, and first-ever spacewalk. You wait 50 years and then three come along at once.

Of course, it’s probably no coincidence that they’ve launched the spaceship this year, or indeed at this particular juncture when – Tibet and melamine-flavoured milk aside – China’s image in the world is perceived as being a positive one on which they can build. There’s been a lot of talk about ‘confidence’ and ‘transparency’ – the idea being, it seems, to justify the vast amounts of money spent on such projects (each space suit alone cost $4.5 million US) on the grounds that it will attract more foreign investment to China by showing how far they’ve come as a modern nation. One commentator summed it up by saying that the reason why it has taken until now – more than forty years after the first space walk was conducted by the Soviet Union in 1965 – for China to reach this level of technological achievement was that, unlike the former USSR and America, China has not been competing with anyone to show its dominance of space. China is, he said, ‘only in a race with itself’. In which, of course, as in a one-party state, there can be only one winner.

As I’ve had nothing better to do this week, and as we’ve only got one TV channel (assuming I don’t want to sit through hours of Chinese game shows, karaoke shows and badly acted costume dramas; funny how you can tell they’re badly acted even when you can’t understand a word), over the last couple of days I’ve been following live coverage of the space mission, at least for as long as I can stand it. Having been MUCH too young to watch the moon landings this was, as far as I can recall, my first experience of live space broadcasting, and bloody hell is it boring. It was also China’s first attempt at making such a programme (they were going to do a live transmission of the last manned space launch in 2005, but wimped out at the last minute in case it blew up or something), and it showed.

Apart from amusing little touches like the fact that the rocket which launched the spaceship was called ‘Long March’ (how long can they keep milking that one?), and that the rows upon rows of technicians at the Beijing mission control base were, inexplicably, dressed in jannies’ overalls, the programme – whose intro featured suitably Star Wars-type music and graphics – made excruciating watching. Mostly, nothing was happening, but as with all live broadcasts where they’re waiting for some momentous event they tried to fill the time by discussing pointless minutiae and attempting to explain the proceedings to the uninitiated viewer. To this end, they’d invited a couple of experts – a Chinese scientist and an American academic - into the studio, where a female presenter struggled valiantly to make them say something interesting enough to fill half an hour or so.

The trouble was that the Chinese guy had clearly learnt his English from an aeronautics textbook and didn’t know any words of fewer than four syllables. She’d ask him a ditsy question like ‘So where are the astronauts sitting right now?’, and he’d drone on along the lines of ‘ah re-entry module velocity elliptical orbit component verification blah blah’ for about ten minutes in a robotic Chinese monotone, whereupon she’d titter ‘Oh ha ha, I’m getting a bit lost now, this is a bit technical for me, ha ha! Professor Lewis, maybe you can put it in simpler terms for us?’ Unfortunately, however, he couldn’t, being possessed of – if it’s possible – an EVEN MORE robotic and boring style of delivery than the first bloke. Obviously the director had just looked at these guys’ qualifications on paper and decided, ‘Yeah, they sound intelligent, let’s get them in’ – without troubling to audition them to see if they were remotely suitable for telly or should really have been left locked up in a deserted castle somewhere with lots of bubbling test-tubes and a servant called Igor.

On Day 2, the first Chinese scientist had been replaced by a second, whose command of English was sketchy and unintelligible. Professor Lewis was still there and starting to emerge as front runner. By Day 3, with Chinese scientists nos. 3 and 4 trying their luck, he had come to realise that he was the unlikely star of the show, and was warming to his role. ‘Their blood would BOIL !’, he exclaimed with glee - talking about the effects of failure to depressurise correctly - holding up his fingers like an Italian chef savouring a particularly flavoursome sauce. ‘It would cause excruciating PAIN, and possibly even KILL the astronauts!’, he added, a demonic glint in his eye.

Anyway, amidst all this, some facts which may have escaped you in the old west. All the astronauts are aged 42 and considered to be at their physical peak, which gives me hope that I’m not quite over the hill yet. Mind you, for the last two years they’ve been living in special training camps eating space-food, only being allowed home at weekends, and for the last couple of weeks haven’t been allowed home at all in case they caught a virus.

Two of them, Zhai Zhigang who did the spacewalk and his backup Liu Boming, are from Heilongjiang - where we are. Our boys in space; almost makes you proud. They didn’t say they’re from Harbin so I would imagine they’re from little one-horse towns – the equivalent of having two guys from Auchtermuchty and Ecclefechan up there. Zhai Zhigang in particular, it seems, came from a very poor family. His father was infirm and his mother made her living selling toasted sunflower seeds on the street. The story – romanticised possibly – is that when he passed the entrance exam for the army, she borrowed 15 Yuan (about £1.25) from a neighbour to buy him a briefcase, but all she had to put in it was toasted sunflower seeds, so that’s what he went off to army training camp with.

She didn’t live to see her son become a national hero.