Chapter 30: The debate over freedom (part two)
"As far as I know, it was only in January this year that the unmanned spacecraft Shenzhou 2 was successfully launched. Before that, there had been no attempts or breakthroughs in crewed spaceflight. We were still a long way off."
A single question from Lin Luoran left Su Can momentarily at a loss. It had come so suddenly, and he had actually talked himself into a corner. In the era Su Can had come from, these familiar facts had been readily at hand. Under the limitations of the present, however, there were still many things he simply could not use or mention.
Seeing the entire room fall silent, waiting for Lin Luoran's challenge to be answered, Su Can paused, then countered, "Does our opposing debater believe that, after the United States and the former Soviet Union, our country's crewed space program remains a distant prospect? That our pursuit in this field has never yielded a breakthrough?"
Zhao Zhidong, the male law student on the opposing team, began speaking with easy confidence. "Of course not. Although Shenzhou 2, launched this year, was an unmanned spacecraft, its technical configuration was essentially identical to that of a crewed spacecraft. Experiments in space life sciences, space materials, and space astrophysics were conducted aboard it in a microgravity environment. Turtle heart cells were also extracted to observe the effects of the space environment on them. It even carried various algae, including fish-star algae and spirulina, as well as bacterial specimens such as E. coli. This precisely demonstrates that our country's crewed space program has entered an intensive preparatory stage. We can anticipate earthshaking changes over the next ten years. Yet our opposing debater managed to get even information like this wrong. That only proves that his usual