NASA's Not Alone In Facing Manned Spaceflight Budget Crunch

After wowing global audiences over the past three years, China is reportedly now coming to terms with budgetary constraints and technical challenges that will delay its fledgling space program's next planned launch for over a year... and will bump a planned moon mission to 2021 at the earliest.

"We're in no rush. We have to take it one step at a time," senior Chinese space official Huang Chunping told Reuters Sunday, during a break in a meeting of parliament.

The next manned Chinese spaceflight -- originally scheduled for 2007 -- will now likely liftoff in late 2008, due to technical issues with the next-generation space capsule designed to seat up to three taikonauts. That mission is also scheduled to include at least one spacewalk, a first for the Chinese program.

Despite ongoing plans to launch an unmanned lunar orbiter in 2007 -- which would be China's first satellite to travel outside earth orbit -- technical challenges and tight budgets may also conspire to delay a Chinese moon mission until 2021, Huang says.

"Putting a man on the moon -- it will be impossible for at least the next 15 years," he said.

After riding the success of its first manned spaceflight in 2003 -- followed last October by a two-man trip lasting five days -- China appears to be grappling with the economic realities of a space program that competes for budgetary dollars with programs needed closer to home.

"Our country can't invest all its money in space exploration, despite its importance. It has to be viewed in a rational way," Huang said. "China is now, for example, paying particular attention to solving rural issues" -- where an estimated 750 million Chinese live.

"The cities in China are like Europe, but the countryside is like Africa," Huang added, saying he understands why funds he'd like to see go towards spaceflight are needed at home. Huang himself grew up poor in a village in Fujian, according to Reuters.

Huang is quick to point out the delays aren't due to insurmountable problems -- but rather a lack of funds and resources, compared to space programs in the US and Russia.

"Our technology has no problems, nor do our designs. But economically we can't do it. That's why we're so behind space powers like Russia and the United States," he said.

Don't count the Chinese out, however. The country has come far since the days when Mao Zedong declared that China was incapable of launching even a potato into space. That was 1957... the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1.

FMI: www.cnsa.gov.cn/main_e.asp