CHINA has unveiled plans for a crewed mission to Mars in 2033, amid warnings of a looming “space war” with the United States.
Beijing also wants to send follow-up flights in future years, as part of a long-term plan to build a permanently inhabited base on the Red Planet and mine its resources.
The ambitious plan, which will intensify a race with the US to plant humans on Mars, was disclosed in detail for the first time after China landed a robotic rover on Mars in mid-May in its inaugural mission to the planet.
Crewed launches to Mars are planned for 2033, 2035, 2037, 2041 and beyond, the head of China’s main rocket maker, Wang Xiaojun, told a space exploration conference in Russia recently by video link.
Before the crewed missions begin, China will send robots to Mars to study possible sites for the base and to build systems to extract resources there, the official China Space News reported on Wednesday, citing Wang, who is head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.
For human inhabitation on Mars, crews would have to be able to use the planet’s resources, such as extracting any water beneath its surface, generating oxygen on-site and producing electricity.
China must also develop technology to fly astronauts back to Earth.
An uncrewed round-trip mission to acquire soil samples from the planet is expected by the end of 2030.
The US space agency NASA has been developing technology to get a crew to Mars and back sometime in the 2030s.
China’s Mars plan envisages fleets of spacecraft shuttling between Earth and Mars and major development of its resources, Wang said.
To shorten the travel time, spacecraft would have to tap energy released from nuclear reactions in the form of heat and electricity, in addition to traditional chemical propellants, Wang said.
China would have to accomplish round trips with a total flight time of “a few hundred days”, he said.
China is also planning to set up a base in the south pole of the Moon and is deploying robotic expeditions to asteroids and Jupiter around 2030.
Last week, China sent three astronauts to an unfinished space station in its first crewed mission since 2016, expanding its growing near-Earth presence and challenging US leadership in orbital space.
The move comes after the US warned its Space Force will become a “combat credible arm of the military” to battle increasing threats from enemies like Russia, China and Iran.
The specialist organisation dedicated to orbital warfare has spent five years in the “establishment phase” since being signed off by ex-president Donald Trump in 2019.
Lt Gen David N. Miller said last month at the US Embassy in London: “We are moving from establishment into developing the service into a combat credible military service.
By Millie Turner, Senior Technology & Science Reporter
Visions of humans on the Moon once more has sparked a renaissance for the space race of the 1960s.
While China has replaced the Soviet Union in this iteration, it is once again the US going toe-to-toe with whichever global superpower is brazen enough for the challenge.
The pair are already locked into an Earth-bound tech war, with fist-shaking over computer chips, AI and TikTok, which has somehow erupted into a race for the stars.
Nasa boss Bill Nelson hasn’t shied away from calling it a “race”, either.
Under President Xi Jinping, China spent roughly $14billion (11.2billion) on its ambitious space programme in 2023, according to Statista.
The US space agency has dominated the industry so far, though has only recently swallowed the bitter pill of scrapping the Viper Moon mission after $450million had already been spent, citing spiralling costs and delays.
Nasa’s own Mars Sample Return has also been subject to pushbacks, as the mission timeline falls back into the 2040s from its original 2028 launch date.
China’s knack for building things fast, and well, could tip the scales – effects of which we might be seeing in real-time, as the country looks set to beat Nasa to Mars.
Though I have no doubt that date will be revised at some point in the future.
“Increasingly the character of warfare that includes space as an operational domain for warfighting is becoming more and more apparent to everyone.
“In order to compete in today’s environment, deter conflict and prevail conflict, we’re going to have to take similar approaches to developing, generating and fielding capability.”
The US accused Russia of launching a counter space weapon capable of attacking satellites into low Earth orbit in May.
