// ARS TECHNICA — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
The United States is about to wake up to the threat from China's space program
One big question: Will China assert territorial rights where its rover explores?
There are generally two schools of thought in the Western space community when it comes to the prospect of China landing humans on the Moon in the next few years and very possibly beating NASA and the United States in its efforts to return astronauts there.
Many people will ask what the big deal is. After all, NASA won the space race to the Moon nearly six decades ago, when Apollo 11 landed there. That it took so long for anyone else to follow speaks to the magnitude of the US achievement, they might say.
But others have a starkly different opinion. A dominant storyline of the 21st century has been the economic and geopolitical rise of China, and what was once a unipolar world now has two large nations vying for supremacy across a number of fronts. One is space. If China can land humans on the Moon before the United States returns, it will represent a huge geopolitical win. From a propaganda standpoint, it will allow China to declare that it has not just caught up to the United States but surpassed it as this century’s superpower.
An important test of whether you believe the former or latter could come as soon as this month.
As soon as this Sunday, a Long March 5 rocket will launch from a coastal seaport in China, carrying the Chang’e 7 lunar exploration mission. This is the latest and most sophisticated mission in China’s successful lunar exploration program, which dates back nearly two decades.
The mission will pack a punch: It contains a lunar orbiter with high-resolution cameras and other sophisticated tools, a lunar lander, a lunar rover, and a mini-hopper of a probe. Although the lander’s mass has not been disclosed publicly, it is several times larger than the NASA-backed probes that have recently landed on the Moon, such as Firefly’s Blue Ghost.
But what is most notable about Chang’e 7 is where the probe is going. It will land near one of the most compelling regions of the Moon, Shackleton Crater, very nearly at the South Pole. Much of the lunar surface is pretty barren, but the South Pole, and Shackleton Crater in particular, offers some of the most coveted real estate there.
This is because the high rims of the crater create permanently shadowed regions known as “cold traps,” where it’s thought that water (in the form of ice, of course) and other useful materials may have accumulated over billions of years. In all of NASA’s and China’s plans for long-term settlement on the Moon, relatively few square miles at the South Pole of the Moon matter the most.
Humans have been flying missions to the Moon since 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna 1 spacecraft passed within several thousand kilometers of the lunar surface. But in all that time, across more than 100 successes and failures, no spacecraft has ever landed at the South Pole of the Moon.