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WENCHANG, China (AP) – China’s last trip to the moon is another milestone in Asian power’s slow but steady rise to the stars.
China became the third country to put a person into orbit 17 years ago and the first to land on the other side of the Moon in 2019. Future ambitions include a permanent space station and the return of people to the Moon more than 50 years after the United States. made.
But even before the last lunar mission took off before dawn on Tuesday, a senior program official argued that China was not competing with anyone.
“China will set its development goals in the space industry based on its own considerations of engineering science and technology,” said Pei Zhaoyu, deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center from the Chinese National Space Administration, to reporters a few hours before the Chang ‘. Mission 5 has been launched.
“We don’t put rivals (ahead of us) when setting these goals,” said Pei.
Whether this is true or not is debatable. China has a national plan to bring the United States, Europe and Japan into the top ranks of technology producers, and the space program has been a major part of that. It is also a source of national pride to enhance the reputation of the ruling Communist Party.
What is clear is that China’s cautious and gradual approach has racked up success after success since it first put one person in space in 2003, joining the former Soviet Union and United States. This was followed by more manned missions, the launch of a space lab, the placement of a rover on the relatively unexplored far side of the Moon, and, this year, an operation to land on Mars.
The Chang’e 5 mission, if successful, would be the first time rocks and lunar debris had been brought to Earth since a Soviet mission in 1976. The spacecraft’s four modules exploded on top of a huge Long rocket. March-5Y from the Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island.
The main task of the mission is to drill 2 meters (about 7 feet) into the moon’s surface and pick up about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of rocks and other debris. The lander will drop them into a blocker. A return capsule will bring them back to Earth, landing on the grasslands of the Inner Mongolia region in mid-December.
“Succeeding in the Chang’e 5 mission would be an impressive achievement for any country,” said Florida-based expert Stephen Clark of the Spaceflight Now publication.
China is proud to get to this point in large part thanks to its own efforts, although Russia helped early with the training of astronauts and China’s crewed Shenzhou space capsule is based on the Russian Soyuz.
While there has been collaboration with other countries, especially those belonging to the European Space Agency, which has provided follow-up support for Chinese missions, the United States is not one of them.
US law requires congressional approval for cooperation between NASA and the Chinese military program. Ongoing political and economic disputes, including accusations that China is stealing or coercing the transfer of sensitive trade secrets, appear to cloud prospects for a rapprochement.
The Chinese space program has at times been seen as recreating achievements made years ago by others, primarily the United States and the former Soviet Union. Even China’s permanent space station, currently under construction, is in part a response to its exclusion from the International Space Station, mostly at the insistence of the United States.
Other countries are also moving forward, underlined by the spectacular landing of the American rover Curiosity Mars in 2012 and the return to Earth next month of the Japanese explorer Hayabusa2 with samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu.
Yet China can boast of “increasingly sophisticated and demonstrated space expertise,” said Henry Hertzfeld, director of the Space Policy Institute at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
Lunar exploration remains a priority for China, something that in the future will likely take the form of a “human-machine combination,” Pei told reporters.
No target date for a manned lunar mission has been announced, but Pei said the end goal is to build an international lunar research station capable of providing long-term support for scientific exploration activities on the surface. lunar.
“We will determine when to implement a manned lunar landing based on scientific needs and technical and economic conditions,” he said.
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PA researcher Liu Zheng in Beijing contributed to this report.
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