Jiangyin track tracking ship base

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Emblem of the Strategic Combat Support Force

The Jiangyin Railway Tracking Ship Base ( Chinese  中國 衛星 海上 測控 部  /  中国 卫星 海上 测控 部 , Pinyin Zhōnggúo Wèixīng Hǎishàng Cèkòng Bù ), also known as "23. Basis of the Chinese People's Liberation Army for testing and training "(中国人民解放军第二十三试验训练基地, Pinyin Zhongguo Rénmín Jiefangjun Dì Èrshísān Shiyan Xùnliàn Jidi ), is the home port of the Chinese tracking ships and missiles freighter. It is located on the south bank of the Yangtze River in Jiangyin , Jiangsu Province , about 350 km inland. Unit 63680 (63680 部队) stationed there has been subordinate to the main department of satellite launches, orbit tracking and control (卫星 发射 测控 系统 部) of the Strategic Combat Support Force since January 1, 2016 .

history

The Yuan Wang 2 in 2005

In connection with the development of the Dongfeng-5 intercontinental ballistic missile, at the suggestion of Qian Xuesen, thought had already been given in 1965 to expand the space control network that was being established to the open sea. A special commission was set up which held numerous meetings, twice chaired by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai , to discuss the issue of tracking ships. On July 18, 1967, the project was finally officially started under the umbrella of the then State Commission for Science and Technology and, as is customary in China, named after the date: "Project 718" (718 工程, Pinyin 718 Gōngchéng ), so "the on Project started on July 18th ”. In April 1975, a command post was set up in Jiangyin on the lower Yangtze River to prepare for the construction of a military base. At the same time, the Jiangnan shipyard on the island of Changxing near Shanghai began building two tracking ships , the Yuan Wang 1 and the Yuan Wang 2 (远望 一号 or 远望 二号, literally “looking into the distance”; the lettering on the bow was calligraphed by Mao Zedong ), which were launched on August 31 and October 1977. The two ships were identical in construction, with a length of 191 m, a width of 22.6 m, a draft of 9 m and a standard displacement of 21,000 tons. Jiangyin Naval Base was designated as the “23rd” in October 1978. Chinese People's Liberation Army Base for Testing and Training ”officially opened. However, the two tracking ships still had to go through a whole series of tests on the high seas, the direction finding equipment had to be installed, so that they were not put into service until the beginning of 1980.

One of the reasons for this delay was that the ships were built during the Cultural Revolution , when workers were often more concerned with political gatherings than with the product to be manufactured. During the tests, deficiencies were discovered that needed to be eliminated. In addition, the ships had, in addition to the antennas for track tracking and control of the rockets and satellites, a powerful transmitter for transmitting the data to the headquarters of the Chinese space control network in Weinan . It turned out that this transmitter, as soon as it was put into operation, interfered with the other devices on the ship so much that they were no longer operational. An attempt to first transmit the data with a weak transmitter to the sister ship a few dozen kilometers away, which then sent it to the mainland at full power, could not solve the problem. Finally, Chen Fangyun's engineers designed a frequency distribution scheme in which the radio and USB frequencies were selected in such a way that there was no longer any interference .

The then "Unit 89001" had its first major mission in May 1980 during the first long-distance test of the Dongfeng 5 . At the end of April, the two Yuan Wang ships met at the Zhoushan Islands off the coast of Zhejiang with a total of 16 ships selected from the Eastern Sea Fleet, the Northern Sea Fleet, the Southern Sea Fleet and the research fleet of the National Maritime Authority, as well as 4 helicopters and traveled more than 8,000 km a marine area northeast of Australia, where they formed a square 32 × 32 nautical mile formation. On the Yuanwang 1 of which was Polytechnical Academy Changsha "Computer 151" developed installed China's first mega flop - supercomputers . The ship recorded the rocket's bearing signal and the computer calculated its orbit relative to the ship's position in real time so that the radar and laser tachymeter could be precisely tracked and the helicopters could be guided to the likely point of impact. The ICBM, launched from the Jiuquan Cosmodrome at 10:00 local time on May 18, hit the exact center of the target square, and less than two minutes later they had taken the helicopters out of the water. The Yuan Wang ships also played an important role in the launch of China's first geostationary satellite, Dong Fang Hong 2-2 on April 8, 1984, as well as in tests on September 15 and 27, 1988 with the submerged Changzheng 6, the The only nuclear submarine of the 09II class fired medium-range missiles of the type Julang-1 .

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, it was repeatedly questioned whether the Yuan-Wang ships could make a meaningful contribution to tracking and controlling satellites. Then, however, the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China approved the manned space program on September 21, 1992, after the date as "Project 921" (921 工程, Pinyin 921 Gōngchéng ) designated. Now human lives were at stake, and in order to increase security, a third track tracking ship was laid down, the Yuan Wang 3, which was launched on April 26, 1994 and, after extensive testing, was put into service on May 18, 1995. From August 1998, the oceanographic research ship Xiang Yang Hong 10 (向阳 红 10 号) was converted into a tracking ship at the Chengxi repair yard in Jiangyin, and on July 18, 1999, it was subordinated to the Xi'an satellite control center as "Yuan Wang 4" .

On December 2, 1994, the Yuan Wang 2 had already shown what these ships were capable of. The Dong Fang Hong 3-1 communications satellite, launched on November 30, 1994, had failed the last stage of the Changzheng 3A rocket. The tracking ship then radioed the order to the satellite to ignite its own engine. The power of the engine was insufficient, the satellite only reached a sub-geostationary orbit and had to be abandoned. However, this was the first time that China had performed remote maintenance on a satellite. Following this success, the Xi'an Satellite Control Center, Jiangyin’s supreme service, assigned the task of launching the Dong Fang Hong 3-2 telecommunication satellite on May 12, 1997 and the Fengyun-2A weather satellite on June 10, 1997 to the tracking ship base steer a stable geostationary orbit. With the spin-stabilized weather satellite, the crew of the Yuan Wang 2 succeeded in adjusting the attitude and nutation at the same time , a technology that until then only Russia and the USA had at their disposal.

With the launch of the test spaceship for the manned spaceflight program, later named “ Shenzhou 1 ”, on November 20, 1999, the Jiangyin base was also noticed more by the Chinese public. All four tracking ships had left and were spread across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans (the ground stations in Swakopmund , Karachi etc. did not exist then). When the spacecraft ignored the command sent by the Beijing Space Control Center to re-enter the atmosphere on its second attempt after 14 orbits around the earth , it was Yuan Wang 3, lying off the coast of Namibia , who, after the crew had located the spacecraft, successfully issued the order Initiation of the braking maneuver gave. 9 minutes later, the spaceship had left the radio range of Yuan Wang 3, independently crossed Africa and Pakistan, until it finally entered Chinese airspace via Tibet and landed in Inner Mongolia . On January 4, 2000, the last of the tracking ships returned to Jiangyin. In the 259 day mission, the four ships had covered a total of 185,000 km.

In October / November 2007, the Yuan Wang 2 and the Yuan Wang 3 took part in the Chang'e-1 mission, both for tracing and sending control commands, including swinging the probe into lunar orbit. With this, the tracking ships had expanded their working range from 70,000 km, ie spacecraft in earth orbit, to 400,000 km and had become an integral part of the Chinese deep space network .

equipment

The orbit tracking ships are each equipped with three movable parabolic antennas, which can work like a single large dish via interferometry and are then mainly used for tracking rockets after launch and for satellites in the lower and medium range (less than 2000 km or between 2000 km and 36,000 km) as well as in geostationary (35,786 km) orbits. The tracking ships operate on the S and C bands of the microwave range . In order to increase the measuring accuracy, the tracking ships are equipped with fin stabilizers , which reduce the roll of the ship in wind and swell, for example with the Yuan Wang 5 from 15 ° to 5 °. At the base of the parabolic antennas there are other devices that reduce the swaying from 5 ° to 1 °, and on the antennas themselves there is a device that reduces the swaying from 1 ° to a few angular seconds. This means that the bowls are as stable up to wave strength 6 (4 - 6 m high waves) as with a ground station on solid land. Up to wind force 12 , i.e. wind speeds of 118-133 km / h, the antenna can remain pointing horizontally towards the sky.

The newer track tracking ships have a crew of around 400 men and women who are responsible for the nautical systems of the ship itself, tracking and controlling the spacecraft, telecommunications and meteorology. The drinking and service water for the crew is not carried with them, but is prepared from seawater during the journey using reverse osmosis . After a mission, a tracking ship remains at the Jiangyin base for at least a month, where all systems are checked and the crew exercises after a break for the next mission. On average, all four tracking vessels spend around 600 days a year on the high seas.

Rocket freighter

Since heavy rockets of the type Changzheng 5 and Changzheng 7 , which could only be delivered by sea - which of course also applied to the payloads (space station components etc.) of said rockets - were to be launched from the Wenchang cosmodrome, which has been under construction since 2009 necessary to build appropriate freighters. The problem here was that missiles are very sensitive. There are strict requirements for the temperature, humidity and salt content of the air in the cargo hold, as well as the loading and unloading speed, so that the missiles are not exposed to the sea climate at the manufacturer in Tianjin and, above all, the tropical climate in Hainan for unnecessarily long . For this reason, the engineers at the civil ship department of the Research Institute 708 (第七 〇 八 研究所 民船 部) of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation designed the holds of the Yuan Wang 21 and her sister ship Yuan Wang 22 as closed, fully air-conditioned rooms in which the Rocket stages packed in transport containers are stored in such a way that vibrations are dampened and the fluctuations in the ship caused by the waves are balanced.

In heavy seas, ships without fin stabilizers can tip up to 40 ° from the central axis, which can mean lateral accelerations of up to 0.8 g, while the load on a freight train or truck driving through a curve is only exposed to 0.5 g. Thanks to the special design, however, these load values ​​for rocket freighters are only half that of road transport and only a third of those for rail transport. Thanks to the fin stabilizers, the rocket freighters can operate at wave heights of up to 2.5 m. With predicted wave heights of over 2.5 m, the risk for the valuable cargo becomes too high. In such a case, such as during the transport of the third Changzheng-5 launcher from Tianjin to Hainan (October 22-27, 2019), according to regulations, the freighters must call at a sheltered anchorage and wait for better weather.

The two rocket freighters were built by the Jiangnan shipyard in Shanghai from April 1, 2012 . The Yuan Wang 21 was launched on November 29, 2012, followed by the Yuan Wang 22 on January 24, 2013. After the installation of the electronic equipment and tests at sea, the Yuan Wang 21 was handed over to the Jiangyin tracking ship base on May 6, 2013 who have favourited Yuan Wang 22 on June 28, 2013. The Yuan Wang 21 was first used two years later. On May 14, 2016, after a six-day, 1670 nautical-mile voyage, the freighter delivered a Changzheng 7 launch vehicle to the port of the Wenchang Cosmodrome, from where the rocket made its first flight on June 25, 2016 at 12:00 UTC without any problems. Yuan Wang 22 had already transported the 1800 t heavy and mobile launch table for the Changzheng 5 rockets to Hainan in January 2014, which was built by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology .

With a length of 130 m and a standard displacement of almost 10,000 t, the freighters are relatively small; In order to be able to transport the components of a heavy Changzheng 5 launcher with the associated boosters , i.e. 40 containers, some of which are over 30 m long, both ships have to leave the port. This is related to the situation at Qinglan Port on Hainan. The rocket quay is about 2 km in the interior of the island and offers protection from tropical storms up to wind force 10 (89 - 102 km / h; the summer typhoons on the east coast of Hainan reach wind speeds of over 200 km / h). However, the shipping channels designated for ocean freighters with a theoretical depth of 7.3 m (i.e. without silting) are very narrow: 64 m for the entrance to the port itself and 60 m for the entrance to the particularly sheltered Bamen Bay. For comparison: in Jiangyin, the Yangtze is 600 m wide open for heavy shipping. Therefore, for safety reasons, it was decided not to build the freighters so large that one could transport a Changzheng-5 missile alone.

Yuan Wang class ships built to date

Surname length width Draft height Standard displacement Manufacturer Launch Commissioning Deactivation status
Yuan Wang 1 191 m 22.6 m 9 m 38 m 21,000 t Jiangnan Shipyard August 31, 1977 Early 1980 November 26, 2011 Donated to the Jiangnan Shipyard Museum in Shanghai .
Yuan Wang 2 191 m 22.6 m 9 m 38 m 21,000 t Jiangnan Shipyard October 1977 Early 1980 It has been moored to a quay at Base 23 ( Jiangyin ) since December 2010 , and acts there as a fixed ground station for monitoring and controlling the regular satellite functions.
Yuan Wang 3 180 m 22.2 m 8 m 37.8 m 17,000 t Jiangnan Shipyard April 26, 1994 May 18, 1995 Ocean service
Yuan Wang 4 156.2 m 20.6 m 7.5 m 39 m 12,000 t Chengxi repair yard August 1998 1999 January 2011 Sunk during a target exercise with a Dongfeng 21D medium-range missile.
Yuan Wang 5 222.2 m 25.2 m 8.2 m 40.85 m 25,000 t Jiangnan Shipyard September 2006 September 29, 2007 Ocean service
Yuan Wang 6 222.2 m 25.2 m 8.2 m 40.85 m 25,000 t Jiangnan Shipyard March 16, 2007 July 2008 Ocean service
Yuan Wang 7 224.9 m 27.2 m 44.2 m 27,000 t Jiangnan Shipyard 15th October 2015 July 12, 2016 Ocean service
Yuan Wang 21 130 m 19 m 5.8 m 12 m 9080 t Jiangnan Shipyard November 29, 2012 May 6, 2013 Ocean service
Yuan Wang 22 130 m 19 m 5.8 m 12 m 9080 t Jiangnan Shipyard January 24, 2013 June 28, 2013 Ocean service

Web links

Commons : Yuan Wang 2  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files
Commons : Yuan Wang 3  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files
Commons : Yuan Wang 6  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

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Coordinates: 31 ° 56 ′ 36.5 ″  N , 120 ° 17 ′ 24.1 ″  E