Tom Feeney’s excellent Chinese adventure

Prior to yesterday’s House Science Committee hearing, Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) spoke at a Space Transportation Association breakfast about his recent trip to China, including a rare visit to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the Chinese manned spaceflight center that is typically off limits to Western visitors. (He noted in his talk that while he and two fellow Congressmen were allowed to visit the center, a US Embassy staffer who planned to accompany them was forced to stay at a hotel.) A few notes from his talk:

• He said that, as previously reported, there is some interest among Chinese officials about developing a common docking adapter that would allow Shenzhou spacecraft to dock with ISS or US spacecraft to dock with a future Chinese space station. However, he added that his Chinese hosts said this was a “decision for a higher pay grade”, and noted there would be concerns here about technology transfer.
• There is “enormous” pride in China for their manned space program, which is played up by the Chinese government in order to keep the Chinese public happy. The number one worry of the Chinese government, Feeney claimed, is that “there’s going to be some sort of massive uprising or rebellion within China itself.”
• That pride, though, dissipates whenever the Chinese space program is compared with US efforts. “At that point they get very humble, I think partly because they do not want to be a threat and partly because they do not want to overly excite expectations that they cannot live up to.”
• In a similar vein, he did not see a race developing between the US and China. “I think it’s a mistake to look at China as an extension of the Cold War. This is not the Soviet Union… They have not been an aggressive country since Genghis Khan was running things.” Still, he thinks there would be a competitive reaction in the US if China ramped up its lunar exploration program, for example. “I think some members would be motivated by that, let’s put it that way, but I think more likely the motivation would come from the people of the United States.”
• Listening to the talk, I noticed that the congressman was sometimes a little off with his facts. Comparing the Chinese facilities with what’s at the Kennedy Space Center, he called KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building “a 60-year-old huge warehouse”, about 20 years older than its actual age. Elsewhere he described the US and Russian manned space programs as having histories of “30 and 40 years, respectively”. His pronunciation of Chinese names was also different from what I have commonly heard elsewhere, but then, he’s been to China and I haven’t.