To infinity and beyond: After Space Station, China has plans for a kilometer-long mega spaceship

Every 92.2 minutes, 400 kilometres in the sky, there is a Chinese Space Station circumnavigating the earth marking Beijing's challenge to US domination of space. Over the last two decades, China has been on an overdrive to catch up with and overtake every other space-faring nation, which has seriously alarmed strategists in Washington.

The annual US national security report, released on April 9, 2021, devoted much space to how China is a threat to the US in space. The report said, Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.

20 days later, on April 29, China launched Tianhe aboard its massive heavy-lift Long March-5B rocket. Tianhe or 'Harmony of Heavens' is the core module of the space station, Tiangong, that China is building in low earth orbit (LEO) about 400 Kilometres above the surface of the planet.

The US security threat report had surmised that it expected a Chinese space station to be operational between 2022 and 2024. China proved the timeline wrong because the Space Station's core module is already up and running in 2021 itself. A powerful central computer is already processing data from experiments and beaming them back to Earth.

Tiangong's core module, the 55-foot Tianhe containing life support and control systems, is designed as the living quarters and since June 2021 it has been host to the 3 Taikonauts who have taken up residence and have been conducting research experiments and doing spacewalks. In May, before the humans docked with the module, China had sent the unmanned Tianzhou-2 or Heavenly Ship to deliver cargo to Tianhe.

The Tiangong is being built on the modular design just like the International Space Station (ISS) and by 2022 Tianhe will be joined by Wentian - Quest for Heavens and Mengtian - Dreaming of Heaven modules, which will mainly house scientific experiments. Another couple of years after that, Tiangong is expected to have 14 experiment racks and 50 external probes. Chinese space officials say that there are at least a thousand experiments that are already planned and have been booked by various scientific organisations from around the world. One of them will be the Spectroscopic Investigation of Nebula Gas (SING) an experiment jointly proposed by researchers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

When the year 2021 began, there was only one space station, the ISS, jointly run by the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, which since 1998 has been conducting thousands of experiments for different nations of the world, but not China. Since 2011, China has officially been barred from the ISS because the US Congress, fearing for national security, passed a law prohibiting official American contact with the Chinese space program.

The China National Space Agency (CNSA) in the past 20 years has developed heavy launch vehicles like the nine-storied tall Long March rocket, sent humans to space, deployed station, explored the far side of the moon and successfully landed an orbiter, lander and a rover on the surface of Mars - the only nation to have done so in a maiden attempt. It is also set to soon launch Xuntian China's space telescope, which will be the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope but with 300 times the field of view.

China also has bigger plans in the works for spacecraft as it is now exploring ideas on how to build one that is ten times the size of the ISS or about 1 kilometre in length.

According to the South China Morning Post, the National Natural Science Foundation of China called on scientists to join a five-year project to study the mechanics of an “ultra-large spacecraft spanning kilometres” and that this spacecraft will be "a major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe and staying in long-term."

With the ageing ISS on its last leg of operations very soon, there might again be just one Space Station in the sky above the earth and this time it will be Chinese. CNSA is well on its way to replace Nasa and Roscosmos as the world's leading space agency, no wonder that Washington and Moscow are both worried that Beijing is becoming the force that will drive the next generation of human endeavour in space.