Recently, on the way to explore space, there has been a succession of good news from China's aerospace industry. First of all, the personnel of the "Shen 17" space crew, which went into space last year, will successfully complete their mission and return to Earth at the end of April. Second, the "Shen 18" crew is ready to continue to relay China's space industry.
However, this time at the press conference announcing the "Shen XVIII" manned mission, what attracted more attention was that after the "Shen XVIII", China's fourth batch of astronauts has basically completed the selection and will help Chinese realize the dream of "taking the moon". The eyes of the Chinese are no longer satisfied with walking into the starry sky, but to take the moon for nine days.
Judging from the news revealed at the press conference of the "Shen 18", in addition to the frequent good news of the "Tiangong space station", the manned lunar landing project is also advancing step by step. According to the timetable released by the China National Space Administration, China will be able to achieve the first manned landing on the moon by 2030 at the latest.
The astronaut crew of the Shenzhou-18 manned mission
By 2035, China plans to initially build a lunar scientific research station that can meet the needs of normalized technology verification and scientific research. By 2045, China will complete the construction of an "expanded" scientific research station that can meet the needs of comprehensive scientific research and large-scale resource utilization, and will be based on the lunar scientific research station to prepare for further exploration of deep space.
Not only that, around 2030, China will launch Tianwen-3 to carry out the Mars sample return mission, which is expected to become the first country to return Mars samples. The space road that China has planned can be described in one word as steady and steady. In the aerospace field, saying how much to do is the characteristic of the Chinese, and this mentality is also in sharp contrast to the United States.
When the "Shen XVII" entered space in October last year, foreign media once published an article lamenting that compared with China, which seeks stability, the United States has a distorted mentality. At present, NASA has obviously made too many meaningless political interpretations when faced with the subject of outer space exploration.
Wu Weiren, chief designer of the lunar exploration project
Nielsen, the head of NASA, has said more than once that China and the United States are rivals in the lunar program. At the beginning of the drafting of the "Artemis Accords" of the United States, the concept of the signatories to demarcate a "safe zone" on the moon was included in an attempt to use this concept to bypass the "Outer Space Treaty" and reshape the legal basis for the United States and the West to occupy territory on the moon, which is quite colonialist and "new Cold War" overtones.
In mid-April, during a congressional hearing, Nielsen also publicly shouted that China is designing a "military program" for space, and called on lawmakers to be more vigilant about China and allocate more budget to NASA in 2025. It is not difficult to see from his remarks that the United States has basically copied the "Star Wars" thinking of the Cold War era when planning the road of space exploration, and it is not engaged in scientific research at all, but great power politics.
China, by contrast, is much more rational. For example, in order to win their imaginary "space race", the United States formalized the "Artemis program" in 2017, and stipulated that the United States would send astronauts back to the moon by 2024.
Artemis Protocols
According to the logic of the United States, after seeing this timetable, China should immediately come up with a plan to achieve a manned landing on the moon before the United States. But China did not follow the American script and set the year of its moon landing in 2030. The rational attitude of the Chinese can also be reflected in the promotional video of the concept of the lunar scientific research station released by the China National Space Administration.
When telling the history of human moon landing, this film does not shy away from writing the contributions of the Soviet Union and the United States according to the timeline, and makes it clear that the lunar scientific research station led by China is open to all countries, which is in stark contrast to the "new Cold War" thinking of the United States.
And the Chinese are not in a hurry, the Americans are even more anxious. The United States is mainly anxious about two points: First, the White House's new Cold War calculation of using the PowerPoint of the space race to drag down competitors has not been completed, and China has not fallen into the trap. Second, the U.S. space program was not completed as scheduled.
This is equivalent to the Americans telling a story about the space race, wanting to crush China, only to find that the Chinese are not only not thrown away, but also have a faint tendency to catch up. Just like mentioned above, the US manned lunar landing program started very early, and the original planned time was very advanced, and if nothing else, it should send people to the moon this year.
But the problem is that there are too many "accidents" in this plan of the United States. At present, the United States has not even succeeded in launching the "Orion" spacecraft, the second step of the Artemis program, to achieve a manned flight around the moon, let alone a manned landing on the moon. According to NASA's test drive schedule, manned flights around the moon will not be possible until 2026 at the earliest.
Even if this step is really successful, there is a huge question mark over whether the United States will be able to solve a series of technical problems such as multiple docking, personnel and fuel transfers, and the landing of supermassive lunar payloads in just four years, and complete the manned lunar landing mission before 2030.
NASA Administrator
The United States looks at China step by step, and it is obvious that there is some imbalance in mentality. Nielsen has begun to speak out of his tongue and go against scientific common sense to discredit China's moon landing program. As we all know, China's Chang'e-4 achieved the first successful soft landing on the far side of the moon and returned samples to Earth.
When asked about the project in Congress, Nelson said angrily that the moon's back is "forever dark" and that the United States does not plan to explore it. He also said that the date of China's landing on the moon is 2030, speculating that if the Chinese land first, they will say that this is Chinese territory and the United States is not allowed to enter.
The implication is that the reason why the US lunar exploration project has not been able to see progress for a long time is definitely not a technical bottleneck, but because it does not want to. Then by analogy, the Artemis plan has not seen progress for a long time, and the Americans do not want to. As long as Congress moves and makes enough money, everything will be fine.
Back of the moon
Of course, Nelson's remarks immediately attracted "group ridicule": first, he made a common-sense mistake that the moon back zone is not "forever dark" at all, and second, the research value of the moon back is extremely high, and his remarks are completely smeared for the sake of smearing. Still, it's no wonder that Nelson is unscrupulous. To put it bluntly, the current situation of the United States is to shoot itself in the foot and fall into a trap set by itself.
In the context of the "space race" narrative previously advocated by the United States, if NASA cannot take the lead in the 21st century space exploration and manned lunar landing projects, it will be equivalent to losing the right to speak in space exploration. The PPT made by NASA before, including the establishment of a "safe zone" and the establishment of a "space NATO", has become a joke.
Nelson has a death knell hanging over his head, and every time he advocates a "space race" between China and the United States, this death knell sounds. This death knell is ringing for NASA, which is becoming more and more unable to justify itself, and for Americans who have forgotten their original intention of space exploration. As for China, it will take all mankind step by step to a broader sea of stars.
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