China's desert launch site boasts comforts of home

The Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, from where China’s Shenzhou VI spacecraft will launch, resembles man’s quest for space – an effort to sustain humans in a big void where life was not meant to exist.

The satellite centre is located on the edge of the Gobi desert, a tiny dot of human habitation surrounded by brown, featureless terrain. This is the South Launch Site, which has risen from the desert sand in less than a decade to serve China’s endeavour to send men, and perhaps soon also women, into space.

Rising above the desolate surroundings is a 105-metre launch tower, which became the centre’s most recognisable feature when about one billion Chinese watched China’s first manned space launch on television in 2003.

Connected to the tower by a 1.5-kilometre rail is another tall building designed for inspections of the Long March series of rockets – the workhorses of China’s space programme.

MORE: Read about the latest launch, China’s 50-year-long space programme and Shenzhou, the “divine ship”.

Orange and pale blue buildings make up the futuristic-looking cityscape inside the site’s gates, and visitors travel down streets with names like “Space Road” before they are taken to the East Wing Guesthouse, where food is served astronaut-style on aluminium trays.

Unlike NASA’s launch centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, there are no beaches within a 2000-kilometre radius. So planners have thought of other ways to make life tolerable for the 15,000 people living at the centre.

“We’ve got three schools, a movie theatre, a post office, a hospital,” said an official during an earlier visit arranged for foreign journalists. “We’ve even got a fast-food restaurant serving fried chicken, although I don’t fancy it so much.”

All the facilities that China allows outsiders to look at are at the South Launch Center. A higher level of secrecy rules at the North Launch Site, which played a key role at the height of the Cold War, and probably continues to do so.