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People walk past a billboard with a quote from Chinese President Xi Jinping in a building at the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Wenchang, Hainan province, on November 23, in the run-up to the successful launch of Chang’e 5. China is now a serious space contender. Photo: AP
Opinion
Opinion
by Philip J. Cunningham
Opinion
by Philip J. Cunningham

Late to the space race, China is making strides with Chang’e 5 moon landing

  • China may be a late contender in the space race but the success of Chang’e 5 is an important milestone that moves it ever closer to building a base on the moon
China is well on its way to being a moon power, not in leaps and bounds, but in carefully calibrated steps. The launch of Chang’e 5, which left the earth on November 24 and now orbits the moon, is an important milestone, not just for the rocks it aims to collect, but as a test of the technology necessary to establish a lunar base.

China may be a late arrival to the space race, long dominated by the United States and Russia, but it has not been for the lack of imagination. Chinese literary legend Lu Xun translated From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, hoping to promote an interest in science. Mao Dun credited the traditional legend of moon goddess Chang’e, after which the latest mooncraft is named, as a powerful native archetype for lunar exploration.

When Sputnik I, the world’s first man-made satellite was launched, Mao Zedong hinted that Chinese satellites would follow. During his 1957 Moscow visit, he stood with Nikita Khrushchev to hail the flight of Sputnik II, which was carrying space dog Laika on a lamentable one-way journey to oblivion.
The march of rocket science got sidetracked during the Cultural Revolution and China did not launch its own satellite, the Dongfanghong 1, until 1970. It famously beamed the iconic tune “The East is Red” back to earth, but saw little practical follow-up.
Fast forward 50 years and China is a contender. If everything goes to plan, the Chang’e 5 lunar lander will scoop up rock, detritus and debris samples, and return to earth in late December.

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China launches Chang’e-5 mission to bring back rocks from moon

China launches Chang’e-5 mission to bring back rocks from moon

The 18,000-pound craft, launched from Hainan province by a Long March 5 rocket, is divided into four sections: a service module, a “returner” capsule designed for re-entry to earth, a lunar lander and lunar ascender.

After the four-legged lander collects samples, the upper half will be shot back into space, echoing the modular technique of the American Apollo programme. The returner capsule will use the “skip re-entry” method to decelerate for a landing in Inner Mongolia.
Space travel remains a high-risk endeavour. A failure anywhere in the complex chain of necessary tasks could end the costly effort instantly. Indeed, the Chang’e 5 saw a three-year mission delay due to the July 2017 explosion of a Long March rocket which was then redesigned.
The Chang’e 5 craft is targeted to land in the same lunar plain as the Apollo 12 mission in 1969, Oceanus Procellarum, but it aims to dig and drill the relatively “new” billion-year-old rock formations of an unusual volcano known as Mons Rümker.

The Chang’e 5 mission is an abbreviated one, expected to last a day on the moon, which is about two weeks on earth. It will study its landing site with ground-penetrating radar, panoramic cameras, and an imaging spectrometer.

The solar-powered Chang’e 5, covered in reflective foil, is designed to handle the moon’s scorching daytime temperatures but not equipped to deal with the deep freeze of a lunar night. Once the sun sets below the cratered horizon, the temperature can drop to a minus-232 degrees Celsius.

How China’s Chang’e 5 could take giant leap for world’s space missions

The lunar polar area, with its oblique sunlight and long shadows, is thought to include craters harbouring ice. Elsewhere on the moon, the searing radiation of sunlight causes instant sublimation.

If a moon base is built, it is likely to be in the shadowy polar zone because water is too heavy to transport in volume from Earth. Water on the moon can be used to produce food, rocket fuel and oxygen while a layer of ice, if abundant, offers natural shelter from deadly solar rays.

If Chang’e-5 proves a success, an almost identical model, Chang’e-6, will endeavour to land near the moon’s south pole, a big step on the road to building a lunar base.

Philip J. Cunningham is the author of Tiananmen Moon, a first-hand account of the 1989 Beijing student protests

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