China's Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return and the Plan to Land Taikonauts

A former NASA Mars chief, Scott Hubbard, looks at what China is building and uses one word. Sputnik.

Sputnik? That's not a word you throw around in Washington by accident.

It's the most loaded word in American spaceflight. He told Space dot com in September that if the reporting is accurate, quote, this represents a Sputnik moment. And he added China may be first to find evidence of life on another planet.

Evidence of life. Okay, now I'm leaning in.

So here's the question I want to land by the end. When Beijing says taikonauts on Mars in the twenty thirties... is that a plan, or is that a poster?

And you've got an answer?

I've got evidence. Start with what's actually being built. It's called Tianwen-3. Mars sample return.

Sample return. That's the one NASA couldn't afford.

NASA's version collapsed under cost. China's is in prototype development. Two Long March Five rockets out of Wenchang, on Hainan, in the December twenty twenty-eight window. Sampling on the surface in twenty thirty. Rock back on Earth around twenty thirty-one.

How much rock are we talking?

At least five hundred grams. Dirt and stone, drilled from up to two meters down. And the chief scientist, an academician named Hou Zengqian, is blunt about why. The goal is to find traces of past life on Mars.

Said out loud? Not buried in a geology paper?

Out loud, on state television. That's what set Hubbard off. And the engineering keeps getting more specific too. Lander, ascender, service capsule, orbiter, Earth reentry module. They've cut the landing site list from more than eighty candidates down to nineteen, heading for a final three.

Hang on though. A sample canister doesn't need air, or food, or a ride home for an actual human being. Robots are robots.

No, and that gap is enormous. But the Chinese argument is that this is step one of a stated roadmap. June twenty twenty-one, a conference in St Petersburg. Wang Xiaojun, head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, lays out three steps.

Go on.

Step one, robots. Sample return, scouting base sites, learning to use what's already on Mars... water under the surface, oxygen, power. Step two, crews and a base. And he names years. Twenty thirty-three. Thirty-five. Thirty-seven. Forty-one. Step three, fleets of ships shuttling between the two planets.

Fleets. Sure. And I'm getting a jetpack.

Hold onto that, because Chinese officials don't even agree with each other. Long Lehao said back in twenty fifteen the earliest crewed Mars shot was twenty thirty-five. Then analysts at the U.S. Air University's China Aerospace Studies Institute read the same statements and titled their paper... China will send a crew to ORBIT Mars by twenty fifty.

Orbit. Not land. And fifty, not thirty-three. That's not a disagreement, that's a different century, nearly.

Seventeen years between the poster and the analysis. So how do you tell which one's real? You stop reading speeches and you watch the rocket.

The Long March Nine.

The super-heavy. Fifty-four tonnes to trans-lunar injection. First flight planned for twenty thirty-three. Which is the same year Wang said crews leave for Mars.

You can't debut a giant new rocket and send people to another planet on it in the same year.

You can't. The schedule eats itself. But here's the twist... while the Mars dates stay soft, the Moon dates keep landing exactly when they said they would.

Give me one.

Four fifteen in the morning, Universal Time, July tenth, twenty twenty-six. A white rocket, five meters wide, lifts off Hainan. Eleven minutes later the first stage comes back down and settles into a net strung across a ship in the South China Sea.

A net. They caught a falling building in a volleyball net.

Pretty much. That was the Long March Ten B. February, a low-altitude Long March Ten test plus a max dynamic pressure escape test of the Mengzhou crew capsule. March, approval of a methane version, nine engines, roughly one thousand two hundred sixty tonnes of thrust.

They keep hitting their dates. That's the part that should worry everybody.

That's exactly it. China has committed to people on the Moon before twenty thirty, two launches per mission. Mengzhou carries three to the Moon, seven to their station. The lander's called Lanyue. None of that is Mars. All of it is the muscle you need for Mars.

So answer your own question. Plan, or poster?

The crewed Mars dates are a poster. Tianwen-3 is a plan. On people, nobody is close. On Mars itself, China is the only country with a funded machine aimed at bringing Martian rock home, and that clock runs twenty twenty-eight to twenty thirty-one. Watch for the final landing site. That's when the paper becomes a place.

And if those five hundred grams come back carrying something that was once alive...

Then this stops being a race to plant a flag. It becomes a race to open the jar... and to have your name on the lid.