S8 Ep130: PREVIEW — Bob Zimmerman — China's Non-Transparent Space Program Leaves Astronauts Stranded After Capsule Damage. Zimmerman outlines the opaque nature of the Chinese space program, which publicly reports only successes and shields setbacks. Recently, damag

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

News, Books, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

PREVIEW — Bob Zimmerman — China's Non-Transparent Space Program Leaves Astronauts Stranded After Capsule Damage. Zimmerman outlines the opaque nature of the Chinese space program, which publicly reports only successes and shields setbacks. Recently, damage to the Shenzhou 20 capsule—possibly caused by space debris—rendered the spacecraft unusable, leaving the crew stranded without a functional lifeboat, an unprecedented occurrence in crewed spaceflight history. China rapidly launched a rescue mission using Shenzhou 22, yet the government's refusal to transparently disclose root causes and technical failure details raises serious questions about program integrity and safety protocols.
1958

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is John Batch, a conversation with my good colleague, Bob Zimmerman.
0:04.8	Bob provides a very succinct breakdown of the Chinese space program
0:08.7	and what's good about it and what's not so good about it
0:12.3	and why it is strangely non-transparent, puzzling in space non-transparent.
0:19.8	An event that could have called and still might call for help from
0:23.8	outside. The Chinese tendency is to draw the blinds and not talk. Why? Here's Bob to explain. More of this.
0:34.8	Yep, I would agree with you there. They're very much like the Soviet Union.
0:37.8	They would only tell you about the success.
0:40.0	If they do fix a problem, they then later tell you how they fixed it,
0:43.9	but they don't tell you much about the problem itself.
0:46.8	In the case here, the capsule that the previous, the new crew used to come up to the station, the new crew, it was, I'm
0:58.8	sorry, the spacecraft, the Shenyu 20 spacecraft that the previous crew used to come up to the
1:04.3	station, it had been damaged in some way. They tell us, and this is very little that they tell
1:08.8	us, that it was hit by space debris that crack a crack in one of its windows. And we do not know if that's true. We have no idea. It could be a quality control problem. It could have been a crack that one of the astronauts actually caused on the window. It's, who knows? We don't know. We just know it was damaged so that it could not be used to bring that crew back.
1:34.2	So that crew used the next cruise capsule that had just come up, says Shen Shenshao 21.
1:36.0	And they came home in that.
1:43.6	But that meant the Shenzhou 22 crew was, I'm sorry, 21 crew was stranded on the station with no lifeboat. And this is the very first time ever that a crew on
1:47.5	any space station ever in the history since Sputnik has been stranded in space with no way back.
1:54.6	They'd like to claim the Boeing astronauts last year were stranded, but that really wasn't true
1:59.0	because they could have come back in Starliner if necessary. It wasn't the ideal stranded, but that really wasn't true because they could have come back in
2:00.9	Starliner, if necessary. It wasn't the ideal choice, but they were confident that if they needed
2:06.6	to come back in an emergency, they could have used it. And that proved to be true when Starliner
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 26 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.