Bittersweet of moon rover Yutu's designer(2)

CHILDHOOD DREAM

Jia was born in 1970, the year China sent its first satellite, "Dongfanghong I", into orbit, launching the country into the space age.

When he was 8 years old, he read a book about the solar system and became obsessed with astronomy.

He entered the National University of Defense Technology, majoring in solid rocket engines, and got his masters and doctoral degrees in the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST).

He began work for CAST in 1995, when China's market economy was beginning to boom. Many aerospace experts were lured to private or foreign-funded enterprises. A popular jingle at the time - "Making missiles earns less than selling tea eggs" - highlighted low salaries in the sector.

"I was thinking about leaving too," says Jia, "but exploring the universe was my childhood dream."

Over eight years, he helped to develop the Shenzhou-1 to Shenzhou-4 spacecrafts, Beidou navigation satellites, the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite, and the Ocean Satellite.

When his daughter was born in 2000, he named her "Sihang", meaning focusing on aerospace.

The Chang'e lunar exploration program began in 2004. In July that year, Jia was asked to develop China's first lunar rover.

He had to simulate the environment of moon's surface. What sort of traction would the rover have on the lunar soil? Would it slip? Would the wheels sink? These questions had to be answered on earth.

How to simulate the lunar soil? After much research, Jia found that ash from a volcanic cluster in northeast China's Jilin Province was similar to the lunar soil samples brought back by the US Apollo missions.

Jia went to the provincial capital Changchun and traveled through snow-covered hills for several hours to Jingyu County. He was taken to a factory in the mountains, where the ash was used to make bricks. He bought several trucks of volcanic ash back to Beijing.

In 2011, the team tested the moon rover in a remote desert in northwest China's Gansu Province, transporting drinking water hundreds of kilometers as they continued their trials.