China to send astronauts to Moon by 2030 as space race intensifies

China to send astronauts to Moon by 2030 as space race intensifies

Beijing/Jiuquan: China on Monday announced plans to send a manned mission to the moon by 2030 for lunar scientific exploration, amid its deepening space race with the West.
The announcement was made by Lin Xiqiang, Deputy Director of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), as China is preparing to send a third set of astronauts to its space station on Tuesday.
Li told the media at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Inner Mongolia ahead of the launch of the spacecraft that takes the three astronauts to the space station called Tiangong that China has recently initiated under the lunar landing phase of its manned lunar exploration programme.
The overall goal is to achieve China’s first manned landing on the moon by 2030 and carry out lunar scientific exploration and related technological experiments, he was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.
China’s manned lunar mission came as the US space agency NASA aims to send a second manned mission to the moon by 2025 to explore the south pole for frozen water.
For its part, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced plans to launch its ambitious Chandrayaan-3 mission aimed at demonstrating critical technologies to land the spacecraft on the south pole.
Chandrayaan-3 mission carries scientific instruments to study the thermo-physical properties of the lunar regolith, lunar seismicity, lunar surface plasma environment and elemental composition in the vicinity of the landing site.
China in the past successfully launched uncrewed missions to the moon which included a rover. China has also sent a rover to Mars.
According to Lin, the goal of China’s moon mission also includes mastering the key technologies such as earth-moon manned roundtrip, lunar surface short-term stay, human-robot joint exploration, accomplishing multiple tasks of landing, roving, sampling, researching, returning, and forming an independent capability of manned lunar exploration.
In 2021, China and Russia announced plans to set up an International Lunar Research Station.
Russian space agency Roscosmos said in March 2021 that it has signed an agreement with China’s National Space Administration to develop research facilities on the surface of the moon, in orbit or both.
Lin said China’s manned lunar landing will promote the leapfrog development of manned space technology from near-Earth to deep space, deepen human understanding of the origin and evolution of the moon and the solar system, and contribute Chinese wisdom to the development of lunar science, he said.
The aim of space powers, such as the US, Russia and China, is to set up bases on the Moon for astronauts to live in, Dr McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US told BBC earlier.
“The Moon is being used as a stepping stone to places like Mars,” he says. “It’s a great place to test out deep space technologies.” It also takes less fuel to launch a spacecraft from the Moon than from Earth to travel into deep space, according to Dr Lucinda King, space project manager at the University of Portsmouth.
PTI

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