The Funding Came Through!

The history of space shuttles stretched back decades.

After completing the Apollo Program in the 1960s, the United States shifted its research focus to space shuttles that could be launched repeatedly and maintained easily. The Soviet Union followed close behind in the space race, producing three space shuttles, including Buran and Little Bird, and achieving some success.

Hua Nation had no intention of falling behind, and its own plans soon followed.

One was Project 863-204, the so-called Earth-Space Transportation System. During the initial bidding, the country's aerospace experts had argued over space shuttles for a long time. For a while, those in favor of them even held the upper hand.

But just when the matter seemed settled, the report reached Mr. Qian, who had already stepped back from frontline work.

After reading it, Mr. Qian wrote just nine Chinese characters in the margin. Those nine characters changed the seemingly settled course of space shuttle development—and the future of Hua Nation's aerospace program.

"The spacecraft proposal should also be submitted to the central authorities."

Looking back, that choice was undoubtedly the right one at the time.

Space shuttles were not as promising as they looked. Even two superpowers pouring their nations' resources into the contest struggled to sustain humanity's dream of traveling freely between Earth and space.

Take the United States. Columbia was designed for a twenty-year service life and one hundred launches, yet the combined launches of all five American space shuttles barely exceeded one hundred. Each launch and the maintenance afterward also cost far more than originally estimated.

The Soviet Union fared even worse. Its three space shuttles each launched once, and after the 1990s, they could no longer fly at all. Germany even bought one of the test vehicles and put it in a museum.

Rather than go