“ space program is embedded in their military,” says Cheng. But most experts dismiss this figure as an almost laughable lowball. The figure most widely cited in the press for the annual CNSA budget is $8 billion, or about 40% of NASA’s projected $20 billion. and Yuri Gagarin is to Russia, and if he were speaking out of turn, Beijing would surely not let so influential a voice go uncontradicted.Ĭhina also says nothing at all about its space expenditures-or at least nothing remotely believable. The CNSA has not officially disclosed whether a future base would be crewed or robotic, but as recently as 2017, Xinhua, the official state news agency, reported that Yang Liwei-the country’s first taikonaut-announced that China was indeed “making plans for a manned lunar landing.” Yang is to China what Neil Armstrong is to the U.S. The country has also flown four robotic lunar missions, most spectacularly earlier this year, with the landing of the Chang’e-4 base station and rover on the far side of the moon.īeijing has been explicit about the country’s plans for a south-pole lunar base-Chang’e-4 landed within what would be the Antarctic Circle on Earth. China has now flown multiple crewed missions, conducted spacewalks, and built and launched a mini space station. But in 2003, that started changing when China launched its first taikonaut-the Chinese equivalent of the American astronaut and the Russian cosmonaut. The People’s Republic didn’t launch its first satellite until 1970 and for decades was a space backwater. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) caught the world napping. will cede the moon, and its potential, for what could be decades to come. If Artemis succeeds, it will re-establish American primacy in space and prove that a riven country can once again do great things. It’s all, deliberately or not, an echo of President Kennedy’s 1962 promise to have American astronauts on the surface of the moon by the end of the 1960s-a hard target and a fixed date that he challenged the country to meet. NASA is calling the latest lunar push the Artemis program, named after the mythical sister of Apollo. “We’re not worthy! This pad is too good.” “I can’t believe we get to use that pad,” says Musk. NASA leased Cape Canaveral’s launchpad 39A, from which nearly all of the Apollo lunar missions took off, to SpaceX, which has plans for a crewed flight around the moon as early as 2023.
The timing for such a challenge was good because Florida’s Space Coast is once again buzzing with activity. “It is the stated policy of this Administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years,” he said at a council meeting in Huntsville, Ala. In March, Vice President Mike Pence, the head of the newly re-established National Space Council (it had been disbanded since 1993), announced that the Trump Administration would put Americans on the moon by 2024. Now, though, there is a renewed focus on lunar dominance. has not even had its own way to get astronauts into space, instead buying seats-at a cool $80 million per round trip-aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. And since the final NASA space shuttle stood down in 2011, the U.S. Shortly afterwards, President John F Kennedy announced a new goal: “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth”.None of that is outside the reach of current technology, but since the final Apollo lunar mission returned home in 1972, NASA’s crewed space program has pursued much narrower goals, contenting itself with dog paddling in low Earth orbit. The USSR, in its highly ideological competition in rocket and space technology, trumped the US yet again in sending the first human into space: Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth on 12 April 1961 in the Vostok 1 capsule, three weeks ahead of Nasa astronaut Alan Shepard in his Freedom 7 capsule on as part of Project Mercury. Sputnik 1’s launch on 4 October 1957 bettered a 1955 announcement by President Dwight D Eisenhower of the United States’ intention to develop and launch the first such satellite, with Explorer 1 going into orbit months later on 31 January 1958. Radio beeps from an 80-kilogram beach ball-sized spherical device with four antennas sent waves of what would later be dubbed “Sputnik Shock” by western scientists and politicians, after it proved to be the successful launch of the world’s first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite during the Cold War is regarded as the start of man’s space exploration era, or the so-called “Race to Space”.
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