Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
China has landed a craft to collect samples from the far side of the Moon for the first time and investigate whether it could become a location for a lunar base or deeper space exploration.
The Chang’e-6 lander touched down in the Apollo Basin to collect rock and soil samples on Sunday morning local time, according to the China National Space Administration. State news agency Xinhua hailed the landing as the “first endeavour of its kind in the history of human lunar exploration”.
Chang’e-6 was launched on a rocket from the southern Chinese island of Hainan on May 3 but its controllers waited until the start of June for the right conditions for a landing. Missions to the far side of the Moon are complicated by the fact that no direct communication is possible so other satellites are needed to help controllers maintain contact with a probe.
Chang’e-6 is part of Beijing’s increasingly ambitious lunar strategy, which includes the aim of having a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030 as a precursor to establishing a lunar base.
China and the US are vying to establish the governing framework for lunar exploration. The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, does not establish detailed rules for activity on the Moon.
The Chang’e-6 mission is a test of whether China is on track to hit its lunar goals. “Whoever gets there first will not only have a lead in the science of studying the Moon — they will also have a lead in setting precedent for how resources can be mined and used in space,” said Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank.
Both countries are targeting the far side of the Moon as it contains resources including ice deposits, as well as areas with sufficient sunlight that could provide electricity to support colonies or launch rockets into deeper space.
Bill Nelson, chief of US space agency Nasa, has warned that China could start staking claims to territory on the Moon under the guise of conducting scientific research, an allegation dismissed by Beijing.
China successfully completed the Chang’e-5 mission in 2020, the first time a country had collected lunar samples since the space race between the Soviet Union and US during the cold war.
“Chang’e-5 was a damn complicated mission,” said Blaine Curcio, a China space expert at Orbital Gateway Consulting. “It was the first mission since the 1970s to return lunar samples. That whole process is orders of magnitude more complex than just landing on the Moon.”
In August 2023, India successfully landed a rover on the far side of the Moon, the first mission to touch down near the unexplored south pole, but it did not collect any samples.
Chang’e-6 is equipped with sensors to identify obstacles and map out the terrain, a drill and a robotic arm to collect samples. It will spend the next two days collecting samples.
Read the full article here
