新华社记者任珂 顾钱江 方栋 李来房
Chinese 13th Five-year plan for national strategic projects. In this official list of 100 projects published on 5 March 2016, China's hadal manned station ranks second! Right behind the turbofan engines project and before the quantum communication supercomputer.
After orbiting space lab, China wants an undersea one
08 July, 2012
At the 15th China Beijing International Hi-Tech Expo in May, the China Ship Scientific Research Centre, which built the Jiaolong manned submersible that reached a depth of more than 7,000 metres in the Western Pacific's Marianas Trench last month, revealed the official design of a mobile deep-sea station that is to be used in future ocean exploration.
Equipped with a nuclear reactor, the station would be able to support 33 crewmen for up to two months at a time.
'If a submersible were a plane, this station would be an aircraft carrier,' Ma Xiangneng, a researcher with the project, told China National Radio. 'The station will be an underwater palace, with showers, a living room and laboratories.'
The designs show the station resembling a nuclear submarine, with two propeller fans at the tail. It would measure 60.2 metres long, 15.8 metres wide and 9.7 metres tall, weighing about 2,600 tonnes.
Like a space station, the deep-sea station would have multiple ports to support the docking of smaller manned or unmanned vessels.
Researchers such as Ma have said the station's main purpose would be deep-sea mining. With an underwater 'mother ship' hovering above the station, located just below the surface and undisturbed by weather conditions, mining facilities could be built much more quickly and cheaply than if surface ships were used.
A smaller prototype, able to carry 12 crewmen on an 18-day dive, is expected to be finished by 2015. No completion date was given for the larger station, but some experts think it will be finished by 2030.
It's a risky endeavour, and the Chinese scientists involved conceded that they were aiming for operations at depths where more developed countries had failed. During the cold war, the Soviet Union deployed underwater habitats for military research, and the US built three so-called Sealabs for experiments that included testing the effects of living in an isolated environment.
These facilities all operated in much shallower waters, and they were discontinued relatively quickly after failing to prove their worth. France also tinkered with such deep-sea stations in the 1960s, with its series of Continental Shelf stations.
The Aquarius Reef Base, owned by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is currently the world's only undersea research station. It operates at a depth of just over 19 metres.
The designer, who wished to remain unnamed, said future generations of Chinese submersibles and the planned station would utilise a made-in-China titanium alloy.
Although Beijing frequently says its deep-sea programme is for civilian purposes, there has been no denial of military involvement. Since 2002, the deep-sea project has been financed by the 863 Programme, a government effort that is widely known to focus on military needs.
The China Ship Scientific Research Centre also operates under the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, one of the country's largest builders of naval vessels.
Possible military overtones aside, sending people to such risky depths has also sparked debate. Some experts argue that it will be neither economical nor safe for people to be mining at depths of several thousand metres underwater.
'I think a deep-sea station probably has more military applications than economic value,' he said. 'You don't send miners to a place a million times more deadly than coal pits.'
Working depth 1000 meters, length 60.2 meters, displacement 2600 t, crew 33, endurance 60 days, nuclear powered
Edited by Soheil, 06 May 2016 - 10:14 PM.