With its latest Moon mission success, China’s space programme has the US in its sights

By Simonetta Di Pippo, Bocconi University

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 endeavour 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 gravitional 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.

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