‘It’s a force that can’t be ignored.’
If successful, the Chang’e mission will be a key step in realizing China’s goal of landing Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030 and eventually building a base there.
The results of this mission will have implications far beyond China’s borders. A number of spacefaring nations, including Russia, India, Japan, and the United States, are also aiming for the moon, which some experts see as sparking a new kind of space race.
“China is trying to prove itself to be a force to be reckoned with,” said Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There is,” he says.
If the Chang’e 6 mission is successful, it will demonstrate how sophisticated China’s lunar exploration program has become in a relatively short period of time.
“Twenty-five years ago, they had very rudimentary space capabilities,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based public policy think tank. “From there to today, I think they have clearly surpassed Russia and are only second to the United States in space capabilities.”
China achieved its first lunar landing with the Chang’e 3 mission in 2013 and set up a lander and probe on the lunar surface to survey the moon’s topography. Until then, only the United States and the former Soviet Union had successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon.
In 2019, China reached another historic milestone with the flight of Chang’e 4, becoming the first country to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, the part that faces permanently away from Earth.
The following year, in 2020, China returned to the near side of the moon, which always faces Earth, and landed its Chang’e 5 probe on a volcanic plain known as Oceanus Procellum. There, the probe collected samples and brought them back to Earth, representing a major technological advance.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) held a sales conference in Wuhan last week, inviting scientists from the United States, Europe, and Asia to apply to borrow lunar samples for their research. NASA-funded researchers received rare approval from Congress to submit their proposal, raising the possibility of high-level U.S.-China space cooperation, which is prohibited by U.S. law.
This time, the Chang’e 6 spacecraft aims to land and collect samples in the Antarctic Aitken Basin, a vast ancient impact crater on the far side of the moon.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
