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The 8.5-metric-ton Tiangong 1 (it means “heavenly palace”) is slated to stay in orbit for two years. During that time, China will launch three missions to rendezvous with the orbital lab. Shenzou 8 and Shenzou 9, launching in November and early in 2012 respectively, will be unmanned missions meant to test various rendezvous and docking technologies. Shenzou 10, also slated for sometime in 2012, could be a manned mission if the first two go smoothly. It could also carry China’s first female astronaut, Chinese space officials said.

There are two ways to view this achievement. The more cynical view says that China is only just now doing what America and Russia were doing in the 1970s (Tiangong is way smaller than Skylab and Mir, and America was rendezvousing in orbit during the Gemini days), and that projects like the ISS are light years ahead of the Chinese.

And that’s certainly true. But when you look at the window in which China has ticked these technologies off its checklist, the pace is impressive to say the least. Like nearly everything in China over the past decade or two, its space program is modernizing at a seriously ambitious pace. China launched its first man into space in 2003. Today it put its first space station in orbit, and by 2020 it aims to have a full-blown 60-ton manned orbiting station in place--the only space station belonging to a single sovereign entity.

And this is just the first step for China, whose space ambitions reach all the way the moon and beyond it to Mars. China plans to put a robot on the moon in 2014 followed by a manned lunar base sometime beyond that. And in 2013 a joint Russian-Chinese mission hopes to put a robotic rover on Mars. As the nomenclature of its booster rockets suggests, China is developing a long reach into space.

But all that depends, for now, on the success of Tiangong 1 and the three technology testing missions that follow. And how you feel about this initiative probably has a lot to do with how you feel about China. One reason China generally goes it alone in space rather than collaborating with other spacefaring nations like Japan or the U.S. is that China’s space program is closely tied into its military and therefore shrouded in secrecy. Should China become a dominant player in space over the next century--and given its current trajectory, it certainly could--the balance of power in orbit and beyond could begin shifting. Starting this morning.

[SPACE, BBC]

The new bridge spans Jiaozhou Bay, on the southern coast of China’s Shandong Peninsula in northeastern China. At 26.4 miles long, it beats Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — the previous world-record holder — by at least 2 miles, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Chinese workers toiled at marathon pace to build the bridge in four years, starting at each side and meeting in the middle. The structure has 5,200 pillars and cost at least $2.3 billion, according to Chinese state-run media.

The Guinness officials say the bridge is earthquake- and typhoon-proof, and designed to withstand the impact of a 300,000-ton vessel. It links the port city of Qingdao to the island of Huangdao, cutting drive time from 40 to 20 minutes, according to the state-run China Daily.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Americans are apparently not giving up the world’s longest title without a fight, however. The newspaper talked to Carlton Dufrechou, general manager of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, who pointed out that the Jiaozhou bridge has a bend in it, and that the over-water length is only 16 miles, compared to 24 for his bridge.

“Bunch of wannabes,” he said. Read the Times-Pic’s piece for his full take, in which he calls the Chinese news “propaganda.”

In any case, the bridge looks pretty neat, especially set to this haunting soundtrack. Check out some aerial views below.

[via IB Times]

Just three years after breaking ground, China will open the crown jewel of its high-speed rail network to the public this week. The 186 mile per hour (and that's regular operating speed) Beijing-Shanghai link takes just four hours and 48 minutes to traverse 820 miles of Chinese countryside.

Let’s break down this little infrastructure project by the numbers. It was deemed “shovel ready” just 39 months ago. In that time, Chinese engineers and workers have erected 288 bridges and punched 21 tunnels through China’s often difficult terrain. Some 80 percent of the track is laid 40 feet above the surrounding terrain on concrete pylons, circumventing the need for dangerous roadway crossings. Cost: roughly $34.2 billion.

That’s one big project. But it’s a completed project (that’s one way to manage costs--create a plan and execute it quickly) and one that should serve China well, at least if you are among the upwardly mobile Chinese that can afford train fare. Before its high speed rail boom is over, the Chinese government wants to network the whole of Asia together and eventually run trains all the way across the continent to Europe. An international link to Laos is the beginning, but a dedicated link between China’s two key eastern population hubs also marks a symbolic achievement.

Meanwhile, Americans might have a HSR link between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020. That is, if the Chinese help us build it.

[Telegraph]

First stop: Laos

The eventual plan is to extend the line through Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and Malaysia on its way to the bottom of the Malay Peninsula. To do so, China will have to negotiate with a host of different governments--some of whom are opposed to one another--in order to economically link Southeast Asia. And it seems China is starting with the path of least resistance.

Laos is one of Asia’s poorest nations, currently maintaining just two miles of railroad. Landlocked and without many natural resources to barter, Laos hopes the railway will increase tourism, revitalize the country’s gambling industry, and otherwise bring outside wealth across the border. Next to Thailand or Vietnam, which may want more control or other political concessions out of the deal, Laos is an easy stretch of track to build and could serve as a demonstration that China is making good on its vision of a connected continent.

As for China, if it can extend its track beyond Laos and into Thailand and/or Burma, it gets an extra layer of economic security via access to the Indian Ocean (and, via oil tanker, Middle Eastern crude) as well as to its Asian neighbors. From a more macro perspective, it’s the first step in integrating a geographic region known historically for sharp political disagreements among neighbors and isolationist regimes (Myanmar, for instance, and formerly Cambodia and China itself). And it’s a first step toward a true trans-Asian network that cold eventually reach west to Russia and beyond. Laos certainly isn’t London, but it’s a start.

[WNYC]

Boldly going where no lunar orbiter has gone before

Chang’e-2 is China’s second lunar orbiter and by April 1 of this year had completed all of the tasks it was designed to carry out over its planned six-month lifespan. So SASTIND researchers gave it two more objectives, including snapping images of the lunar poles and dipping into a low orbit to grab some closeups of the Bay of Rainbows, a potential future landing site for Chinese moon missions.

But Chang’e-2 was still humming along on ample fuel reserves after these two additional tasks were also ticked off the checklist. So scientists decided to break orbit and head out deeper into space. The journey to its final destination will take about 85 days.

And what will Chang’e-2 be examining out there? Nothing really. But SASTIND researchers on the ground will be examining Chang’e-2. China has expressed a determination to develop its own home-grown space capabilities rather than lean on NASA, the ESA, or Russia. This trip will mark the furthest a Chinese satellite has traveled into space, and it will give scientists a chance to probe the challenges in communication, data downlink, and control that arise when vast distances separate a spacecraft and the home planet.

Given China’s ambitious space schedule, these things need to be sorted out sooner rather than later. The People’s Republic wants a moon rover on the lunar surface by next year, and a second rover shortly thereafter, which will be capable of collecting samples and returning to Earth with them. Arrival of that mission back on Earth is slated for 2017, just one decade after China’s launched its first lunar orbiter.

[Xinhua]

Not as fun as it sounds

In games like World of Warcraft, gamers can virtually "farm gold", which essentially means playing in a tedious and repetitive way to score some in-game currency--it might mean fighting the same bad guy over and over again, or completing a small task a few thousand times. Players (or, in this case, slavedrivers) actually sell that virtual gold for real-life currency, usually to people in developed countries who want a better character but don't feel like arduously spending days leveling up, and would rather just pay for the stats. Apparently, the guards at Liu's prison realized that they could make even more money forcing prisoners to farm gold than by forcing them to perform manual labor. The 300 prisoners forced to farm gold could earn their guards up to $1,000 per day, not that the prisoners ever saw a single yuan of it.

This kind of forced virtual labor seems like a not uncommon occurrence; anywhere there are lots of people compelled to do manual labor and a way to make money doing it, these kinds of situations will arise. There are virtual sweatshops in which workers must play for 12 hours a day, though accusations of prison virtual labor is new. China has made minor efforts to regulate the trade in virtual goods, but there are still thought to be around 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country.

[via The Guardian]

The ultimate goal is a manned landing and lunar outpost, which China will start building after the sample-return mission, according to Ziyuan Ouyang, the chief scientist ofChina's lunar exploration program. Dates are still pretty tenuous, but last month another Chinese space official said the country would send a man to the moon by 2025.

So far, things have been going just as planned for China’s nascent moon program, which launched a second orbiter last October. The Chang’e 2 mission saw several improvements over Chang’e 1, including a more powerful rocket that delivered the probe to the moon more quickly. Chang’e 3 is supposed to launch sometime in 2013 and land in Sinus Iridium, where it will deploy an autonomous rover.

The robot, pictured above, will be able to “choose its own routes, avoid obstacles, and perform science experiments with a suite of sensors, including cameras, x-ray and infrared spectrometers, and a ground-penetrating radar,” reports IEEE Spectrum, which is covering the IEEE conference.

It will have solar panels and a supplementary power source in the form of a plutonium-238 nuclear battery, the same type installed on the forthcoming Mars Science Laboratory rover.

After the rover mission, China will launch a temporary lunar drill, which will alight on the surface, take a sample and take off again. It will probably be easier to do this on the moon than on an asteroid.

Finally, sometime after 2017 China plans a manned lunar landing, Ouyang told the crowd.

Japan wants a moon base by 2020, and some members of Congress want us to have one by 2022, so if China is able to pull this off it sounds like it could start getting pretty crowded up there.

[IEEE Spectrum]