WENCHANG SPACE LAUNCH SITE, China — China launched an unmanned lunar spacecraft Friday in a unique mission to bring back samples from the far side of the moon, the latest step in a rapidly advancing Chinese space program that is boosting competition with the United States and others.
Chang’e 6 lifted off on time at 5:27 p.m. local time (5:27 a.m. ET) from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China’s southern island province of Hainan.
The launch of the lunar probe, in which NBC News was one of the few news organizations to participate, and the national excitement surrounding it had transformed the normally sleepy fishing village of Longlou into a major tourist attraction, with crowds pouring out of tour buses and heading for the moon. to beaches and rooftops with the best views of the spaceport. One rooftop owner said he sold out 200 seats for 200 yuan (about $28) each.
Ahead of the launch, there was a festival-like atmosphere on the beach, where vendors offered space supplies and groups of children sold Chinese flags for 3 yuan (about 40 cents) each. Families stretched out on picnic blankets and played cards, while others hung hammocks between palm trees so they could wait in the limited shade.
Yiuwah Ng, a 28-year-old real estate office worker from the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai, traveled six hours by car and another three hours by ferry to pick the best spot along the coast, where he had camped for three days. with friends and his dog.
“I want to witness this historic moment,” he said of the launch, his fourth. “It is an important first step for Chinese lunar exploration.”
Max Zhang, a self-described “rocket hunter” from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, has been photographing launches near Wenchang from the beach since 2011.
“I am addicted to the shock of seeing the launches, especially the sound of the rocket flame,” he said. “It makes my heart tremble.”
‘A force to be reckoned with’
If successful, the Chang’e mission will be a crucial step in achieving the country’s goals of landing Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030 and eventually building a base on the lunar surface.
The outcome of the mission will also have consequences far beyond China’s borders. A slew of spacefaring nations, including Russia, India, Japan and the US, also have their sights set on the moon, creating what some experts liken to a new kind of space race.
“China is trying to prove that it is a force to be reckoned with, so China is always competing with everyone in space,” said Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington . .
A successful Chang’e 6 mission would demonstrate how advanced China’s lunar exploration program has become in a relatively short time.
“Twenty-five years ago they had very rudimentary space capabilities,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank based in Washington. “From there to where they are today – I think they have clearly surpassed Russia and their space capabilities are really only second to the United States.”
China achieved its first moon landing in 2013 with the Chang’e 3 mission, which placed a lander and rover on the lunar surface to study the moon’s terrain. Previously, only the US and the former Soviet Union had successfully landed spacecraft on the moon.
In 2019, China achieved another historic milestone with its Chang’e 4 flight, becoming the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon, the part permanently turned away from Earth.
The following year, in 2020, China returned to the near side of the moon, which always faces Earth, and landed the Chang’e 5 spacecraft on a volcanic plain known as Oceanus Procellarum. The probe collected samples there and brought them back to Earth, which represented a major technological leap forward.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has invited scientists from the US, Europe and Asia to borrow the lunar samples for their own research, and held a pitch meeting in the Chinese city of Wuhan last week. NASA-funded researchers received rare approval from Congress to submit proposals, raising the possibility of high-level space cooperation between the U.S. and China that would otherwise be prohibited by U.S. law.
This time, the Chang’e 6 spacecraft plans to land and retrieve samples from the South Pole-Aitken Basin, an ancient and vast impact crater on the far side of the moon.
Conducting a sample return mission from the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth is challenging because mission controllers on the ground have no way to directly contact a spacecraft in that area. Instead, signals must be relayed via a satellite now orbiting the moon, which China launched from the same location in Hainan last month.
Although difficult, the effort can yield tremendous results. Studies suggest that the near side of the moon was more volcanically active than the far side, meaning that all the lunar samples obtained so far may only tell part of the story of the moon’s origins and evolution.
Collecting lunar samples from different geological eras and regions “is of great value and important for all humanity to gain a better understanding of the moon and even the origins of the solar system,” said Ge Ping, a mission leader of CNSA’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, told reporters in Hainan on Thursday.
In addition to its scientific objectives, the Chang’e-6 mission also involves geopolitical considerations. The flight is a precursor to a pair of Chinese robotic missions to the moon’s south pole to explore sites and build a moon base. Last year, Chinese and Russian space agencies agreed to jointly build a research station on the moon’s surface.
NASA and its commercial partners also aim to establish a permanent presence at the moon’s south pole, although the agency’s Artemis moon missions have faced numerous delays and budget overruns. According to the current timeline, American astronauts will not return to the moon’s surface until 2026 at the earliest.
With China and Russia forming a rival coalition, there is some pressure on the U.S. to keep its foot on the accelerator, Harrison said.
“It does matter who gets there first, and it also matters how you get there and what kind of coalition you bring with you,” he said.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has repeatedly warned that the US risks falling behind China’s moon ambitions. In an interview this week with Yahoo Finance, Nelson outlined what’s at stake in the new space race.
“I think it is not incomprehensible that China would suddenly say: ‘We are here. Stay out,” he said.
Asked about international competition in space, Ge said on Thursday: “All countries in the world should explore, develop and use space peacefully.”
“You don’t have to worry too much,” he added. “Space programs are for all people.”
As more countries around the world build space capabilities, NASA has pushed for greater global cooperation, establishing the Artemis Accords in 2020 to promote peaceful, responsible and sustainable practices. The U.S. law prevents China from joining the 39 other countries that signed the accords, which both China and Russia have criticized as a tool to further U.S. dominance in space.
In turn, many Western space policy experts have expressed concerns about China and Russia’s intentions. For example, the full scope of China’s space ambitions is not known because the Chinese space agency does not operate with the same level of transparency as NASA. The country’s space program is also more closely tied to the military than that of the US
“We can never say that Chinese investments in civilian space technologies are purely civilian and should not be used for military purposes,” said Namrata Goswami, professor at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management and co-author of the book 2020. “Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Space.”
While it may seem as if China’s space goals have accelerated in recent years, they are part of a decades-long strategy, Goswami said.
“Many of the leaders of China’s space program announced these goals and timelines 20 years ago,” she said. “What’s amazing to me is that they’re hitting almost all of their milestones on time, and for them that has a strategic advantage in the global story of who’s doing better.”
While the moon and its resources can provoke competition between countries, space exploration can also be unifying, Swope said.
“We are literally a speck in the universe, and when we go to the moon or explore space, we as humanity have that shared human quality of wanting to understand and explore the unknown,” he said. “That transcends politics.”
Janis Mackey Frayer reported from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China, and Denise Chow from New York.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com