Posted on 07/16/2024 2:52:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
June 25 2024 marked a new “first” in the history of spaceflight. China’s robotic Chang’e 6 spacecraft delivered samples of rock back to Earth from a huge feature on the Moon called the south pole–Aitken basin. After touching down on the Moon’s “far side”, on the southern rim of the Apollo crater, Chang’e 6 came back with around 1.9kg of rock and soil, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The Moon’s south pole is designated as the location for the future China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). This truly international endeavor has partners including Russia, Venezuela, South Africa and Egypt, and is being coordinated by an ad hoc kind of international space agency.
China has a strategic plan to build a space economy and become the world leader in this field. It intends to explore and extract minerals from asteroids and bodies such as the moon, and to use water ice and any other useful space resources available in our solar system.
China aims to explore the moon first, then the asteroids known as near-Earth objects (NEOs). It will then move on to Mars, the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter (known as the main belt asteroids), and Jupiter’s moons, using the stable gravitational points in space known as Lagrange points for its space stations.
One of China's next steps in this strategy, the robotic Chang'e 7 mission, is expected to launch in 2026. It will land on the illuminated rim of the moon’s Shackleton crater, very close to the lunar south pole. The rim of this large crater has a point that is constantly illuminated, in a region where the angle of the sun casts long shadows that obscure much of the landscape.
As a landing site, it is particularly attractive — not only because of the illumination, but the easy access it offers to the interiors of the crater. These shadowed craters hold vast reserves of water ice, which will be indispensable in building and operating the ILRS, as the water can be used for drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel.
It is a bold move, as the US also has ambitions to establish bases at the Moon’s south pole — the Shackleton crater is prime real estate. A later Chinese mission, Chang'e 8 (currently planned for no earlier than 2028), will aim to extract ice and other resources and demonstrate that it’s possible to use them to support a human outpost. Both Chang'e 7 and 8 are considered part of ILRS and will set the scene for an impressive Chinese exploration program.
Artist’s concept of an Artemis astronaut deploying an instrument on the lunar surface.
NASA is currently seeking further partners for the international agreement known as the Artemis Accords, established in 2020. These set out how resources on the Moon should be used and to date, 43 countries have signed up. However, the US Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the moon this decade, has been hit with delays due to technical issues.
It is normal to experience some delays in any complex new space program. The next mission, Artemis 2, will carry astronauts around the Moon without landing on it, but has been delayed until September 2025. Artemis 3, which is due to ferry the first humans to the lunar surface since the Apollo era, is planned for no earlier than September 2026.
While this Artemis timeline could slip back further, China may deliver on its plans to land humans on the Moon by 2030. Indeed, some commentators have wondered whether the Asian superpower could beat the US back to the moon.
Geopolitics in space
Will the US land humans on the the moon before the decade is out? I think so. Can China do the same before 2030? I am doubtful — but this is not the point. China's space program is systematically growing in a consistent and integrated way. Its missions appear not to have experienced the serious technical issues that other ventures have encountered — or perhaps we are just not being told about them.
What we know for sure is that China’s current space station, Tiangong – which translates as "Heavenly Palace" — is operational at an average altitude of 400 km. There is a plan to have it permanently inhabited by a minimum of three taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) by the end of the decade. By the time this happens, the International Space Station, orbiting at the same altitude, will be decommissioned and sent on a fiery descent into the Pacific Ocean.
Geopolitics is back as a force in space exploration in a way we perhaps haven’t seen since the space race of the 1950s and '60s. It's quite possible that the U.S. Artemis 3 mission and China's Chang'e 7 and Chang'e 8 missions will all want to land at the same location close to the Shackleton crater. Only the crater rims can feasibly act as good landing sites, so there may be no choice but for China and the U.S. to exchange plans, and to use this renewed phase of space exploration as a new era in diplomacy. While maintaining national priorities, the two superpowers, together with their partners, may have to agree on common principles when it comes to exploring the Moon.
China has come a long way since its first satellite, DongFangHong 1, was launched on April 24, 1970. China was not a player during the original space race to the moon in the 1960s and '70s. It certainly is now.
Well, spending decades stealing everyone else’s scientific and technological wonders kinda gets you to being “in the pack” especially since everyone who you’re stealing from is involved,corrupt and looking the other way, while whistling past the graveyard.....
Nearly everything we buy finances China’s advances.
Bill Clinton helped them big time
When they start stealing our Hollywood producers then we really have a problem...
Lol.
If aliens finally get to this solar system, they’ll think humans all look East Asian from all of the vacuum-preserved bodies they will encounter on the way here.
“...It is a bold move, as the US also has ambitions to establish bases at the Moon’s south pole — the Shackleton crater is prime real estate. “
We just need to resolve the DEI, moslim outreach, and pronoun issues before we can do that.
America has more angry trannies and homeless people than China!
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China calls on scientists of all nations to study lunar samples, but notes obstacle with the US
https://apnews.com/article/china-change-6-moon-samples-probe-nasa-c8aa729d0e026349231a05914f9f69f4
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NASA plays 'blame-shifting' game with China as lunar soil research set to start
US' weakening engineering capability root cause for stagnation: experts
"As the US space industry recently faced yet more delays and stagnation with key components including manned spacecraft and space suits "going wrong," NASA has once again resorted to its "sour grapes" rhetoric upon seeing China's successful retrieval of fresh lunar soils from the far side of the moon, by claiming that China did not directly invite its scientists to participate in the lunar soil research. "
Maybe they have NASA beat, but SpaceX is leaps and bounds ahead of the chinese.
There is no “race to the moon”. China is taking care of business in good order and not bothering about whether the US gets there (again) or not.
Who cares. We’ve got our own rock and soil samples and we’ve had them for sometime now. More samples will show much the same thing, the moon is a rock and little else. Any minerals, ores or water that MIGHT be on the moon will be so ludicrously expensive to mine and recover that’ll it’ll be decades at least before it’s feasible to get them.
SpaceX is leaps and bounds ahead of the chinese.
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Artemis 3 depends on StarShip which is no where near ready, and if it was, it will take 15 refuelings to get to the moon. The refueling concept may be tried this year, but 1 success does not prove production quality. That will take many many successful refuelings to prove.
StarShip is just too heavy. It works fine to LEO and above, but needs refueling to achieve geosynchronous orbit with very large payloads. And is useless for Direct to Geosynchronous Orbit military missions.
The Chinese are using both the standard composite materials and the-everything-works-the-first-time approach. So they are lighter and more nimble than the Starship in its current form.
NASA is just a very very expensive joke with its Lunar orbital station concept.
We’ve got our own rock and soil samples and we’ve had them for sometime now. More samples will show much the same thing, the moon is a rock and little else
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Those samples only come form one area of the moon - its a big place with varying geology. Plus, many of the samples have never been looked at and many others given away.
The idea is to use what is one the moon to make things on the moon - not return them to Earth. Judging expenses by current rocket tech is silly.
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