robot on Mars, a human on the moon



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BEIJING (AP) – China’s landing of its third probe on the Moon is part of an increasingly ambitious space program that has a robot rover en route to Mars, develops a reusable space plane and plans to hand over the humans on the lunar surface.

The Chang’e 5, the first effort to bring moon rocks to Earth since the 1970s, collected samples on Wednesday, the Chinese space agency said. The probe landed on the Sea of ​​Storms on the near side of the moon on Tuesday.

Space exploration is a political trophy for the ruling Communist Party, which wants global influence to match China’s economic success.

China is a generation behind the United States and Russia, but its secret, military-related agenda is growing rapidly. It creates separate missions that, if successful, could put Beijing at the forefront of space flight.

The coming decade will be “quite critical” in space exploration, said Kathleen Campbell, astrobiologist and geologist at the University of Auckland.

“This is where we’re going to transform out of near Earth orbit and back into what people will call ‘deep space’,” Campbell said.

In 2003, China became the third country to launch an astronaut into orbit alone, four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States. Its first temporary orbiting laboratory was launched in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for the launch of a permanent space station after 2022.

This week’s landing is “a historic milestone in China’s cooperation with the international community in the peaceful use of space,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.

“China will continue to promote international cooperation and the exploration and use of outer space in the spirit of working for the benefit of all mankind,” Hua said.

After astronaut Yang Liwei’s flight in 2003, space officials have expressed hope for a manned lunar mission this year. But they said it depended on budget and technology. They pushed that goal back to 2024 or later.

The space agency gave no reason to land its last probe on the Sea of ​​Storms, far from where the American and Soviet craft landed. But the choice could help shed light on possible sites under consideration for a crewed mission.

The Beijing space plane is said to be the Chinese version of the American space shuttle and the short-lived Buran of the former Soviet Union.

China has also launched its own Beidou network of navigation satellites so that the military wing of the Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army, does not need to rely on US GPS or a rival Russian system.

Last year, China stepped out of “me too” missions copying Soviet and American companies to mark its own firsts when it became the first nation to land a probe on the unexplored other side of the moon.

This probe, the Chang’e 4, and its robot rover are still operating, transmitting to Earth via an orbiter that passes over the other side of the Moon. China’s first lunar lander, the Chang’e 3, is still transmitting.

China’s first crewed spacecraft, the Shenzhou capsules, was based on Russian technology. Its powerful Long March rockets are, like their Soviet and American predecessors, based on ballistic missiles developed using technology seized from Nazi Germany after World War II.

China has acted more cautiously than the frenzied Soviet-American space race of the 1960s, which was marked by deaths. China’s manned missions went off without incident. Some robot vehicle launches have been delayed by technical issues, but these appear to have been resolved.

China is in a growing space rivalry with its Asian neighbors, Japan and India, which it sees as strategic competitors. The two sent their own probes to Mars.

As Chang’e 5 collects moon rocks, the Japanese space agency has just achieved the even more difficult feat of obtaining samples from an asteroid, Ryugu. The Hayabusa2 mission is to deliver them to Earth on Saturday.

As his confidence grew, Beijing’s space goals multiplied.

It has joined the race to explore Mars, and its Tianwen-1 probe, launched in July with a robot rover to look for signs of water, is expected to complete its 470 million kilometers (292 million miles) journey in February.

Plans call for a permanent manned space station as early as 2022.

China is being banned from the International Space Station due to US opposition to including Chinese military officers in a business that would otherwise be operated by civilian space agencies.

The plans also call for an international lunar research base at some point, the deputy director of the Chinese agency’s lunar exploration center, Pei Zhaoyu, told reporters last week.

Despite its successes, the Chinese military-run program is more secret than those of other governments.

Yang and other Chinese astronauts made only a handful of brief public appearances after their flights, unlike Soviet and American astronauts who were sent on a world tour before cheering on foreign crowds.

The agency announced in September that its space plane had performed a successful test flight but has yet to release details or even a photo of the craft.

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Milko reported from Jakarta, Indonesia.

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The Associated Press’s Department of Health and Science receives support from the Department of Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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