China’s ambitions in the Moon race

On April 1, NASA successfully launched the Orion spacecraft carrying four astronauts into space on the Artemis II mission. Orion will fly around the far side of this celestial body and return to Earth. If no major problems arise, NASA will test lunar stations on the Artemis III mission in 2027 and perform the first lunar landing in 2028 with Artemis IV.

Meanwhile, another powerhouse of the aerospace industry, China, also aims “before 2030”. This country plans to use the Long March 10 rocket to launch the Mengzhou (Meng Chau – dream boat), with a cabin size similar to Orion, with three astronauts to the Moon. Another rocket carries a lunar lander called Lanyue (Lam Nguyet – embracing the whole moon) and this ship will rendezvous with Mengzhou in the orbit of this celestial body.

In February, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) tested the launch of Dream Chau, demonstrating the emergency launch abort system and how the spacecraft separated from the rocket. Later this year, an unmanned Mong Chau spacecraft is expected to be launched to China’s Thien Cung space station orbiting the Earth.

“It looks like the ship is almost ready to take off,” commented Quentin Parker, Director of the Space Research Laboratory at the University of Hong Kong. China will conduct more test flights before attempting to land on the Moon in the next few years.

Meanwhile, NASA initially planned to land on the Moon in 2024, but the mission was constantly postponed because the hardware was not ready, such as the landers undertaken by SpaceX and Blue Origin are still in development. Therefore, Artemis IV’s schedule may be pushed back further than the 2028 mark, which means it is still possible for China to become the first country to land on the surface of the Moon since 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission.

According to Parker, China has the ability to keep up with progress, so “it will likely go to the Moon first”. Since 2007, China has deployed a series of robots to the Moon, including a mission to land on the far side in 2019 to retrieve samples and bring them back to Earth five years later.

China’s plan

In the first landfall expected in 2030, China may aim for a location near the equator, where the surface is flatter and safer, according to Nature. The country is considering 14 landing locations, one of which is the ancient volcano Rimae Bode, located north of the Moon’s equator.

Jun Huang, a planetary scientist at the China University of Geology in Wuhan, and his colleagues published an analysis of the region’s geology in March. “Landing at Rimae Bode is like opening a high-resolution history book about the life of the Moon,” he said, because the site is believed to contain material from the mantle – below the crust and above the metallic core – of the Moon as well as debris left behind by previous impacts.

“The site offers a rare ‘all-in-one’ opportunity to resolve long-standing open questions about the formation and evolution of both the Moon and the Earth,” the scientist said.

In the long term, China and the US both aim to land on the Moon’s south pole, where there may be frozen water. Moon mission teams expect the ice to split into hydrogen and oxygen, creating rocket fuel, thereby turning the celestial body into a transit station between Earth and farther reaches of the universe.

China also hopes to build a lunar base with Russia, called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s. According to the China Space Agency (CNSA) last year, the two countries plan to study the Moon’s geology and conduct astronomical observations, among many other goals.

In February, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency was facing “competition from its biggest geopolitical rival” and needed to “go faster, without delay, and achieve its goals.”

However, according to Namrata Goswami, a space security researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Alabama (USA), China’s focus is not necessarily on becoming the first country to return to the Moon, but on establishing a long-term presence. “They see the Moon as a strategic high position,” she said.

This country emphasized deep space exploration as one of the key goals in the new 5-year plan, announced in March. “The US is the one racing with China, not vice versa,” Ms. Goswami commented.