The great dream of taking the Chinese to the moon and mars – 05/03/2021

China Last Thursday I launched the first of the three elements For its future space station, “CSS”, another step in the invasion of space was begun 60 years ago by Chairman Mao Zedong.

Assembly of the station will be carried out over ten missions and will be completed by the end of 2022.

China is investing billions of dollars in its space program, in an attempt to catch up with Europe, United State s Russia. Among his most ambitious projects is to place a remotely controlled robot in Mars Or send Chinese to Colors By 2030.

In 1957, the Soviet Union put the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, in Earth orbit. Founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao ZedongThen she launched a call to her citizens: “As we make satellites!”

The first phase began in 1970. China launched its first satellite, Dongfanghong-1 (“Red East-1”), named after a song of Mao’s glory, whose tune will be broadcast for several days in space.

The rocket that puts the satellite into space is called the Long March, a name reminiscent of the Red Army journey that allowed Mao to establish himself as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

Only in 2003 was the Asian giant sent its first Chinese into space, astronaut Yang Liwei, who flew around the Earth 14 times in 21 hours. With this flight, China became the third country, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to send a human into space by their own means. Since then, it has regularly conducted manned space missions.

China has been deliberately excluded from the International Space Station (ISS) program, which began operating in 2000 and involves Americans, Russians, Europeans, Japanese and Canadians. So he decided to build his own station.

To achieve this, it first launched a small space module, Tiangong-1 (“Heavenly Palace 1”), and placed into orbit in September 2011. It is used for astronaut training and medical experiments.

In 2013, the second Chinese astronaut, Wang Yaping, presented a course in physics that was broadcast live from Tiangong-1 to hundreds of millions of students and viewers on Earth. Tiangong-1 went out of business in March 2016. The laboratory was considered as a preliminary stage in building a space station.

Another important milestone happened in 2013: the landing of the small, remote-controlled robot “Jade Rabbit”, responsible for taking pictures, for example. It encountered technical problems at first, but eventually it was reactivated and explored the lunar surface for 31 months, much longer than its expected life.

In 2016, China launched the second Tiangong-2 space module. Astronauts carried out, among other maneuvers, technical coupling devices.

The space program failed in the summer of 2017 with the failed launch of the Long March 5, which is crucial as it allows the propulsion of the heavy cargo needed for some missions. The setback led to a three-year delay in Chang’e 5’s mission – a Chinese moon goddess – to explore the moon with a robot, which was carried out in November and December 2020.

It is achieving its goal of bringing samples from the Moon to Earth, which has not happened in 40 years.

China had dealt a major blow in January 2019 for the first time in the world: the landing of a remote-controlled robot (“Jade Rabbit 2”) on the far side of the moon.

In June 2020, the country launched the last satellite to complete the Beidou navigation system (a competitor to the US GPS).

In July 2020, it sent the “Tianwen-1” probe, which is currently in orbit around Mars. He hopes to place a mobile robot on the surface of the Red Planet in May 2021.

Under the “space dream” slogan of President Xi Jinping, the country aims to achieve bigger goals. In 2022, upon completion of assembly of the space station, China will become the third country to build one on its own (after the United States and the Soviet Union). He plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2030 and build a base there in cooperation with Russia.

Astronauts and scientists have also talked about the possibility of sending the Chinese to the red planet in a distant future.