Nothing in aviation or space in 2007 represented a greater change in the status quo than China’s ascendancy to the first rank of space powers. China had proven its mettle four years earlier by becoming only the third member of the elite club of nations capable of flying humans in space. But in 2007, it accomplished two more feats, proving to the world that it’s a space player to be reckoned with across the board.

In January, China destroyed one of its own spacecraft with a ground-launched missile, shattering the aging weather satellite. Then in October, China launched its first planetary mission, sending a scientific probe to the Moon (see p. 59).

The man who laid the foundation for these achievements is a brilliant scientist who worked for the U.S. military on advanced rocket projects in the 1940s and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Then, in a remarkably short-sighted move, the U.S. sent this man back to China with all his skills and knowledge of American secrets. With McCarthyism in full bloom, the scientist was deported on dubious charges of being a Communist.

That man is Qian Xuesen. And he became the father of the Chinese space program. (The name, sometimes spelled Tsien Hsue-shen, is pronounced chien shu-eh sen.)

The antisatellite (Asat) test demonstrated an ability—based on advanced sensors, tracking and precise trajectory control technologies—which had previously belonged only to the U.S. and Russia.

The Asat’s warhead, launched by a ballistic missile, intercepted its satellite target nearly head-on, creating an extremely high closing velocity that multiplied the challenges in this test and served to underscore the leap in Chinese technology.

The test was condemned worldwide as the largest instance of space pollution in history. Thousands of new pieces of debris, more than 900 of them large enough (10 cm.) to be tracked by ground radars, were suddenly in orbit. They threaten low orbiting satellites of all nations, including the International Space Station. The amount of space junk hurtling around the planet, accumulated in the 50 years since Sputnik, had shot up by 10% in an instant.

Worse, because the target satellite, at 860 km. (535 mi.), was fairly high, some fragments will take at least a century to be slowed down and brought back to Earth by the few molecules of atmosphere at that level.

China has not explained why, even if it felt it had to conduct the test, it did not use a specially built low-mass target that might have been blasted away at a lower altitude, leaving a smaller debris cloud of shorter duration. Soviet and U.S. Asat tests ended in the 1980s, when far fewer satellites were in low orbit and the dangers of space junk correspondingly lower.

While China’s space program began 2007 with a spectacular bang, it ended the year with a more peaceful, but still remarkable, achievement—when the country became the first developing nation to launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.