A major theme in communist governments is the idea of central planning. Every five years, the central authorities in communist countries lay out their goals for the country over the course of the next five years, which can range from limiting infant mortality to increasing agricultural yield. China, the largest current polity ruled by communists, recently released its fifteenth five-year plan, which lays out its priorities for 2026-2030. This one, accompanied by a press release of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s state-owned giant aerospace corporation, has plenty of ambitious goals for its space sector.
Perhaps the most culturally significant part of the announcement is the country’s plans for Tiangong Kaiwu, its space mining project. Named after a foundational 17th century Ming Dynasty Encyclopedia, and roughly translated as “The Exploitation of the Works for Nature,” this project is focused on mining water ice from resources in space.
Most western space mining firms are concentrating on bringing back rare materials, such as platinum and palladium, to Earth as part of their space mining efforts. China, on the other hand, sees the potential for harvesting water, both as a source of biological necessity, but also as a way to split it into rocket fuel. The current plan is focused on feasibility studies, with the next 5 years focused on tech demos of things like robot drills and in-orbit processing, with the intention to scale up to full industrial mining at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Fraser discusses whether he’s concerned about China’s space policy.From a technical standpoint, the most ambitious plan might not even be feasible. There’s been a lot of hype around the idea of putting data centers in space currently, and the plan mentions building “gigawatt-level space digital infrastructure” as one of its core goals. Space certainly has some advantages over ground-based data centers, such as access to (almost) 24/7 sunlight and no competition for power from other demand centers, such as cities. However, there is one huge technical problem that has yet to be solved for these data-centers in the sky - heat.
While space is typically considered “cold”, more importantly, it is a vacuum. On Earth, data centers require massive cooling systems that constantly run air (or water) over their processors to get rid of the waste heat and stop them from literally burning themselves out. In space, however, there is not such convective solution. Even if you ran air or water over the surface, there’s nowhere else for it to go to cool down. The only way to get rid of the “waste heat” of a gigawatt’s worth of power is to radiate it away using infrared light. In the very real engineering world, doing so would require radiators the size of football fields. Those are well beyond the capabilities that any current space-faring organization has to launch, let alone China with its relatively limited rocket payload sizes. This goal seems more like a direct challenge to SpaceX, which also faces the same technical difficulties, than a realistic assessment of what the country will be capable of achieving in five years.
Another arena of direct competition with SpaceX and its private western competitors is space tourism. China’s organizations do have a leg up here, as they own their own space station, which could serve as a type of “hotel” to space tourists, similar to how SpaceX can host tourists on the international space station. But in a more immediate sense, they’re going to start at the same place SpaceX and Blue Origin started-off - by launching tourists above the Kármán line. On January 12th, CAS Space, a commercial spin-off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences tested a tourist vehicle capable of doing just that.
Video of the CAS Space Lihong-1 Y1 rocket test last month. Credit: VideosFromSpace YouTube ChannelThe most nebulous of the goals listed in the press release is an aim to "strengthen China’s role in shaping international regulations for space traffic management…” Here, the second largest country (and economy) in the world is saying that they want more of a say in standards and regulations that will dictate how the space industry operates. Since those frameworks and standards are normally set by Western countries, it's unclear whether China intends to set up competing structures or engage more fully with the existing system to dictate what the future of space infrastructure will look like.
Five-year plans are when governmental goals move from “theoretical” to a guarantee of funding. The contrast with America’s deeply gutted funding for NASA and its science programs more generally couldn’t be starker. As China continues to catch up in the technologies that will define the next stage of space exploration, many of its companies and foundations will look to this plan for guidance. Organizations that hope to compete against them should as well.
Learn More:
CGTN - China unveils 'space+' ambitions for tourism, mining and more
UT - China Outlines Future Plans in New Video, Including Finding Earth 2.0
UT - China Releases its First Roadmap for Space Science and Exploration Through 2050.
UT - Here's What China is Planning to do in Space for the Next 5 Years