June 25, 2024 marked a new “first” in the history of spaceflight. China’s robotic spacecraft Chang’e 6 sent rock samples back to Earth from a large feature on the Moon called the South Pole – the Aitken basin.
After touching down on the “far side” of the moon, at the southern rim of Apollo Crater, Chang’e 6 returned with about 1.9 kilograms of rocks and soil, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The Moon’s south pole has been designated as the location for the China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). This truly international effort has partners including Russia, Venezuela, South Africa and Egypt, and is being coordinated by a sort of ad hoc international space agency.
China has a strategic plan to build a space economy and become a world leader in this field. It aims to explore and extract minerals from asteroids and bodies like the moon, and to use water ice and any other useful space resources available in our Solar System.
China aims to explore first the moon, then asteroids known as near-Earth objects (NEOs). It will then go to Mars, the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter (known as main belt asteroids) and Jupiter’s moons, using stable gravitational points in space known as Lagrangian points for its space stations.
One of China’s next steps in this strategy, the Chang’e 7 robotic 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 place, it is particularly attractive – not only because of the lighting, but also because of the easy access it offers to the interior of the crater. These shadowy craters hold large reserves of water ice, which will be essential in the construction and operation of the ILRS, as the water can be used for drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel.
It’s a bold move, as the US also has ambitions to establish bases on the moon’s south pole – Shackleton Crater being prime real estate. A subsequent Chinese mission, Chang’e 8 (currently scheduled for no earlier than 2028), will aim to mine ice and other resources and demonstrate that it is possible to use them to support a human outpost .
Both Chang’e 7 and 8 are considered part of the ILRS and will set the stage for an impressive Chinese research program.
NASA is currently seeking further partners for the international agreement known as the Artemis Agreement, established in 2020. These define 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 problems.
It is normal to experience some delays in any complex new space program. The next mission, Artemis II, will carry astronauts around the moon without landing on it, but has been delayed until September 2025. Artemis III, which will carry the first humans to the lunar surface since the Apollo era, is planned not earlier. than September 2026.
While that Artemis timeline may slip further, China could fulfill its plans to land men on the moon by 2030. Indeed, some commentators have wondered whether the Asian superpower could beat the US back to Moon.
Geopolitics in space
Will the US land men on the moon before the decade is out? So I think. Can China do the same before 2030? I doubt it – but that’s not the point.
China’s space program is systematically growing in a sustainable and integrated manner. Its missions do not seem to have experienced the serious technical problems that other ventures have encountered – or perhaps we are simply not being told about them.
What we do know for sure is that China’s current space station, Tiangong – which translates as “Heavenly Palace” – is operational at an average altitude of 400 kilometers.
There is a plan to permanently inhabit it 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 has returned as a force in space exploration in a way that perhaps we haven’t seen since the space race of the 1950s and 1960s. It is quite possible that the US Artemis III mission and China’s Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 want to land in the same place near the Shackleton Crater.
Only the rims of the crater can act as good landing sites, so there may be no choice but for China and the US to exchange plans and use this renewed phase of space exploration as a new era in diplomacy.
While maintaining national priorities, the two superpowers, along with their partners, may have to agree on common principles when it comes to lunar exploration.
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 initial space race to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s. It certainly is now.
Simonetta Di Pippo is director of the Spatial Economy Evolution Laboratory, Bocconi University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.