China's first 'kiss' marks great leap forward in space programme

By Andreas Landwehr and Michael Scaturro Nov 17, 2011, 14:12 GMT

Beijing - China closed a successful chapter in its growing space program Thursday with the end of its first space docking mission.

Shenzhou-8, an unmanned spacecraft, landed in north China on Thursday.

The craft first rendezvoused and then docked with the space lab module Tiangong-1 on November 3, in what Chinese media referred to as a 'kiss' between the two crafts.

The conjoined vessels orbited Earth for 12 days and conducted another docking after a brief disengagement on November 14, the government's news agency Xinhua reported.

Though the mission essentially replicated those conducted in the 1960s by Americans and Russians, the docking marks a considerable leap forward in China's relatively young space programme.

'In terms of comparisons, China is now where the US was during the Gemini program in the 1960s. They have, however, been able to come up the learning curve faster because they are duplicating feats done initially by others,' Joan Johnson-Freese of the US Naval War College told dpa.

With this month's success, China gains admission to a unique club of three nations that are able to conduct such missions.

Chinese television images offered blanket coverage of the mission throughout, and on Thursday in particular.

But besides being viewed as a patriotic feat, the mission also bore a political tone.

It was seen as a precursor to China's development of its own space station, which is to be completed by 2020.

In the past, political rivalries led the United States to scupper any cooperation with China.

This has translated to China being blocked from sending its space craft or scientists to the International Space Station (ISS).

Some experts think this friction led the Chinese to speed up their own space station building programme.

But, in an unexpected twist to the ongoing political tussle, between the two nations, China revealed this week that Shenzhou-8 is compatible with the Intenational Space Station (ISS), as well as with Russian and United States stations.

This new fact could open a window for possible cooperation between the United States and China if the political climate changes.

NASA's director Charlie Bolden extended an olive branch to China at the start of the mission, suggesting that the two nations cooperate on preventing the spread of waste and discarded satellites from space missions, designing emergency solutions, and on science projects.

But a Republican-backed congressional stipulation banning financing for such Sino-American space projects will have to be stricken before a cooperations like this can come to fruition.

In addition to helping the Chinese test designs for a future space station, Shenzhou-8 carried a Sino-German life science research lab containing 17 biological and medical experiments conducted jointly by German and Chinese experts.

Previously, the country had collaborated with Russia's science programme on the ground and in Russian space labs.

This cooperation marked the first time China has taken non-Chinese experimental labs into space.