‘The space race is with China’, says NASA director – 07/25/2023 – Science

On a mission to Brazil to negotiate agreements between the country and the United States, mainly in relation to the Amazon, NASA director Bill Nelson revealed that the great American rival in the space race to take man back to the moon is China.

According to the head of the space agency, the prediction is that NASA will send a manned mission to the Moon next year, more than 50 years after the Apollo missions.

“Us [EUA] we’re going to the moon next year, for the first time in half a century. And in the last ten years, the Chinese have improved a lot [nesta área]. They’re very secretive, their space program is basically military — although they say it’s not.”

Nelson criticizes the lack of transparency of the Chinese, since the Asians do not disclose the details of their missions to the world, as do NASA and other active space agencies, such as ESA (European), Jaxa (from Japan), CSA (from Canada), Isro (from India) and from the United Arab Emirates.

“They [chineses] they are not transparent. For example: when they launched their space base, their rockets had no fuel to make a controlled re-entry. [na atmosfera]. Then each of the three thrusters [que levavam as partes da base para o espaço] returned to the planet and they didn’t divulge the coordinates of where they would fall”, Nelson shot.

“First we thought it would be in Greece, then it looked like it was in Saudi Arabia and, luckily, in the case of the second rocket, it ended up falling into the Indian Ocean, it didn’t hit anyone. But at no point did they talk about it, they are always very secretive.

Although other countries are investing in missions outside the planet, the Americans do not consider them worthy opponents to land on the Moon.

India, for example, launched the Chandrayaan-3 mission on July 14 and expects the spacecraft to reach the Moon at the end of August to explore the lunar South Pole, a place never visited and which can produce valuable scientific data. However, the mission will be carried out by a rover, not humans.

During the Cold War, the US dispute was with the then Soviet Union, which led to the Apollo missions.

Until NASA sent the first humans to the Moon with Apollo 11 in 1969, it was the Soviets who were at the forefront, with Luna 2, the first probe to reach the lunar surface, in 1959; Sputnik, the launch of the first artificial satellite, in 1957; and Luna 9, the probe that took the first picture of the satellite’s surface, in 1966.

With the end of the Cold War, the economic power of now Russia declined at the same rate that China’s increased. In this way, the Chinese began to compete directly with the Americans.

Since then, the Chinese have already built their own space station, Tiangong (which means Celestial Palace) – after the United States created obstacles for the Asian country’s participation in the International Space Station (ISS) –, in addition to sending probes to explore the Moon and Mars.

And on May 29 of this year, for the first time, the Chinese agency announced the official program to take its astronauts to the lunar soil before 2030. Before that, this mission was treated as a hypothesis and did not have a certain deadline.

The program will involve a new launcher capable of carrying astronauts, the Chang Zheng 10 (or Long March 10) rocket, a next-generation spacecraft (more capable than the traditional Shenzhou), a lander, lunar suits and other elements of the program.

Another plan by China is to develop an International Lunar Research Station, initially unmanned, in the 2030s, which will certainly expand exploration capacity over the years.

NASA’s prediction of returning to the Moon in 2025 hangs on the success of the Artemis 3 mission. The American program, however, depends on the successful development of the Starship, SpaceX’s vehicle that was chosen to carry out the first two landings.