Journalist Andrew Jones on China's space program
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.7 • 710 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2021
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andrew Jones, a Helsinki-based reporter who over the last several years has secured a place as the go-to English-language journalist covering China’s space program. With the successful arrival of the Tianwen spacecraft in Martian orbit and the deployment of the Zhurong Mars rover, China is catching up quickly with NASA in space exploration milestones. But China’s space program also comes in for criticism for its opacity and for potentially dangerous practices — like the uncontrolled reentry of a large Long March 5B rocket in early May. Andrew gives the latest on China’s outer-space ambitions, including planned missions to Jupiter’s outermost Galilean moon, Callisto, and beyond the edge of our solar system.
7:09: A look at the China National Space Administration
13:02: Major missions done by China’s space program
24:31: U.S. hesitance toward space collaboration with China
48:39: China’s private space companies
52:53: Potential future Chinese space missions
Recommendations:
Andrew: The TV series The Expanse, available on Amazon Prime Video, the FIRST UP daily newsletter from Space News, the Axios Space newsletter, and the podcast Moonrise by the Washington Post.
Kaiser: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 0:14.7 | Subscribe to SubChina's daily access newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds of different news sources or check out all the original writing on our site at subchina.com including reported |
| 0:26.1 | stories, editorials, and regular columns, as well as a growing library of videos and, of course, |
| 0:31.9 | podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious |
| 0:36.7 | entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim people in China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing |
| 0:38.5 | repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim people in China's Xinjiang region to China's ambitious |
| 0:43.2 | efforts to eliminate poverty. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation |
| 0:48.7 | that is reshaping the world. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you today from Chapel Hill, North |
| 0:53.2 | Carolina. China's ambitions |
| 0:55.3 | in space have been in the news a lot recently, especially in the last couple of years, just |
| 0:59.6 | three months or so after the perseverance is landing on the surface of Mars, something that, like |
| 1:05.2 | many people I know, I watched in real time, China landed its own rover on the red planet. |
| 1:10.7 | The Tianwen spacecraft entered |
| 1:12.6 | Martian orbit in February, and then on May 14th, its lander unit touched down on the |
| 1:17.1 | Martian surface, and just a little over a week after that, the Zhurong rover exited the lander |
| 1:22.1 | and rolled out onto Martian soil. This followed on some other notable Chinese accomplishments. |
| 1:29.1 | You know, in January of 2019, China was the first country to land a craft on the far side of the moon, incorrectly known as |
| 1:34.7 | the dark side of the moon. It's actually just the far side. And a rover called the Jade Rabbit 2, |
| 1:40.2 | started sending data back to Earth. And in late 2020, the Chang'a 5 brought back the first moon rock samples that we've seen in |
| 1:48.3 | four decades. |
| 1:50.1 | China's space program, of course, has not been without controversy. |
| 1:53.6 | Listeners probably recall that very recently, the first stage of a Chinese Long March 5B |
... |
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