China pushes ahead for its Moon mission
China announced plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2030 for lunar scientific exploration, amid its deepening space race with the West and India
IANS
As the US space agency pushes back its timeline to send a manned mission to the Moon, China has roped in Pakistan and Belarus to its Moon programme that aims to construct a permanent lunar base in the 2030s.
In May last year, China announced plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2030 for lunar scientific exploration, amid its deepening space race with the West and India.
China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) programme now has seven nations -- Russia, Belarus, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Venezuela and South Africa -- according to SpaceNews.
It is in direct competition with the NASA-led Artemis Programme, which aims to place astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030.
Pakistan is already involved in China’s Chang’e-6 lunar sample return mission, due to launch in mid-2024. It is also working on the ICUBE-Q cubesat for the mission in cooperation with China’s Shanghai Jiaotong University.
Beijing plans to launch the Chang'e-6 and land it on the Moon in the first half of 2024 to collect samples from the far side of the Moon — which no other country has attempted to date — and to send the Chang'e-7 probe around 2026 to implement resource exploration of the lunar south pole.
