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BEIJING (AP) – Cui Tingting dyed his hair Mars red for the arrival of the Chinese spacecraft to the planet known in Chinese as the Fire Star.
“This is a great era for space, and the future of humanity lies in the exploration of outer space,” said Cui, director of the China Mars Society, the local chapter of a global advocacy network. She hosted an online party Wednesday night to await news that the Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched last July, had reached orbit on Mars.
A video of attendees across China showed a replica of the Tianwen-1 robot rover in the home of a company member. One was wearing a homemade spacesuit; another controlled his robot dog.
“Earth is our home planet… but to me, Mars is the same,” Cui said.
China is falling in love with space, inspired by the ruling Communist Party’s increasingly ambitious plans over the past two decades to launch humans into orbit and explore the moon and Mars.
Tourists flock to the tropical island of Hainan to watch the rockets take off. Others visit simulated colonies of Mars in desert sites with white domes, airlocks and space suits. The number of space-themed TV shows, books and fan clubs is increasing.
The most popular space-themed account on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service, “Our Space,” has 1.25 million subscribers.
The expanding space program coincides with President Xi Jinping’s campaign to promote an image of China returning to its former glory as a world leader.
“It’s a symbol of power for China,” said Chen Qiufan, a Guangdong science fiction writer whose books include “Waste Tide”.
The Xi government is trying to fuel public enthusiasm with a five-year action plan for science literacy. It includes a pledge to support the development of Chinese science fiction.
In November, the Beijing city government announced plans to build a sci-fi industry cluster area to attract talent and create “influential sci-fi original works.”
“You have to harness the power of movies, movies, and science fiction to spread propaganda and this idea: we have to go,” Chen said, comparing it to Renaissance.
This love affair also spreads to Japan, India and other countries that send probes through the solar system, joining a club of explorers long dominated by Washington and Moscow.
The race to explore Mars is so crowded that Tianwen-1 isn’t even the only spacecraft to arrive on the planet this week.
On Tuesday, Amal, a spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates, rocked into orbit.
In the UAE’s largest city, Dubai, the government projected images of the two moons of Mars into the sky. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper glowed red at night. Billboards depicting Amal, in Arabic for Hope, dominate Dubai’s highways.
In India, one of the country’s biggest movie stars, Akshay Kumar, directed a 2019 blockbuster, “Mission Mangal,” based on the country’s first mission to Mars.
A new collection of short stories written in half a dozen languages titled “The Best of World SF” captures this world wonder, said book editor Lavie Tidhar.
In American and British science fiction, Mars often plays the virgin utopia of the decrepit dystopia of Earth, but not elsewhere, said Tidhar, who grew up in a kibbutz, a collectivist commune in Israel. In his novels “Martian Sands” and “Central Station”, a reborn Soviet Union, China and Israel bloom on the dark landscape of Mars.
“It’s boring, it’s hot, it’s cramped. Kind of like growing up in a kibbutz – except you can never leave, ”he says.
China’s first science fiction book, “City of Cats” in 1933, was released to Mars.
The genre died out during the ultra-radical Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, when the US-Soviet space race inspired movie studios to release “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Solaris”.
China returned to other make-believe worlds with the explosive success of Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem”, first published as a periodical from 2006 to 2010. In 2015, Liu became the first Chinese author. to receive the Hugo Prize, the highest science fiction award.
A Hollywood-style blockbuster, “The Wandering Earth,” based on a short story by Liu, grossed over $ 700 million worldwide in 2019.
China became the third country to launch an astronaut into orbit alone in 2003, four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
Its first temporary orbiting laboratory was launched in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022.
Space officials had expressed hope for a manned lunar mission as early as this year, but said it depended on budget and technology. They pushed that goal back to at least 2024.
Science fiction writers already imagine Chinese colonies on Mars.
Hao Jingfang’s novel “Vagabonds”, published last year, sits between a Martian society without poverty but austere and a poor, overpopulated and polluted Earth. Hao became the first Chinese author to receive the Hugo Prize in 2016.
Luo Lingzuo’s 2019 “Land Without Borders” imagines Chinese scientists genetically modifying potatoes to make them grow in amber Martian soil. Physicist Liu Yang’s “Orphans of the Red Planet,” about high school students on Mars fighting hostile aliens, is being turned into a TV series.
“We have to go to space,” said Chen, the sci-fi author from Guangdong. “Then we have the power equivalent to that of the United States, then we can become the giant.”
Cui of the Mars Society is already planning another party in May when the Tianwen-1 robot lander is due to land.
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Associated Press researchers Caroline Chen in Beijing and Chen Si in Shanghai and writers Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Krutika Pathi in New Delhi contributed to this report.
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