A school for interstellar navigation

On the morning of 27 January, in front of the memorial hall to China’s two-bomb-one-satellite programme on the shore of Yanqi Lake, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences opened a school with a name that would have been science fiction a generation ago: the School of Interstellar Navigation. It is the first institution of its kind in the country, and its founding is a deliberate act of long-range planning, a university committing resources today to a field whose first serious payoffs are decades away.

The new school will focus on three areas: interstellar propulsion, deep-space communication and navigation, and space science. Its stated purpose is to train the scarce combination of engineers and scientists that these fields require, people with a solid grounding in physics and engineering who can also think at the scale of decades and light-minutes. The academy’s talent programme is led in part by Wang Chi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of its National Space Science Center, which gives the school a direct line to the country’s most active space science institutions.

The choice of location is not decorative. The Yanqi Lake campus sits next to the memorial to the two-bomb-one-satellite era, the early programme under which China built its first atomic weapons and launched its first satellite, and the ceremony deliberately linked the new school to that history. The gesture reads as a statement of continuity: the earlier generation mastered rocketry and orbital flight under far poorer conditions; this school is meant to train the generation that will operate beyond the inner solar system.

The timing deserves a word about how these things actually work. Interstellar propulsion today means electric and nuclear concepts tested in laboratories, solar sails flown as demonstrators, and a long list of ideas that are physically plausible and unproven; navigation across light-minutes is a harder problem than navigation across the lunar distance; and space science at the edge of the heliosphere is served by a handful of probes whose successors are still being designed. Disciplines at that stage need their specialists to begin young, because the first engineers of a real interstellar mission will retire before it launches. The school is, among other things, a deliberate answer to that timeline: it makes the pipeline begin now, rather than when the missions exist.

What the school will actually do, in its early years, is more modest than the name suggests, and the modesty is part of the design. Interstellar navigation as a practical discipline currently means propulsion concepts that exist on paper or in small prototypes, navigation across distances measured in light-minutes, and the science of the outer planets and the heliosphere, the bubble the Sun blows around the solar system. The field’s flagship real projects, the far-future interstellar probes and crewed missions that the name evokes, will be flown by people who are now students or not yet born. The founding of the school is a signal that the pipeline is meant to start now.

For the wider picture, the school joins a pattern in spacefaring nations: countries that intend to stay in the deep-space business begin training the specialists years before the missions exist. The announcement drew the standard range of reactions, from the admiring to the amused, and both are beside the point. Universities have always been in the business of training people for jobs that do not yet exist, and a school named for a horizon is not a promise that the horizon is near, only a decision that someone should start walking toward it.