Leadership: As our space program, once an example of American exceptionalism, now sits mainly in museums, Beijings ambitious program takes another leap forward toward an eventual return of man to the moon. As the world unravels, efforts to leave it dont seem very newsworthy, and efforts by our strategic rivals to do what we did decades before seem redundant and almost irrelevant to more immediate concerns. Yet Chinas space program does matter, as its part of that countrys dream of world leadership and, yes, domination. It represents a commitment to world leadership that we have lost under this administration. Beijing sees its multibillion-dollar space program as a symbol of its rising global stature and mounting technical expertise as it builds a military with global reach and flexes its strategic muscle. Its moon orbiter has been transported to the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in the southern province of Sichuan for launch later this year, according to a statement Sunday by Chinas State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. The orbiter will test technology for Chinas ambitious Change-5 mission, which aims to gather samples from the moons surface and return them to earth. It will follow a free-trajectory path, circling behind the moon and then using its gravity to whiplash the orbiter back to earth, as our Apollo 13 did on its ill-fated moon mission. Its one more small step in Chinas long march to the moon, which late last year saw China land a lunar rover. The Change 3 spacecraft and its lunar rover, sent aboard a Long March 3B rocket launched Dec. 2 from southwest China, is the latest triumph of an ambitious military-backed space program. Goals include a manned orbiting space station and landing astronauts on the moon, possibly to plant Chinas flag next to the U.S. flag left there in 1969. The rover itself is called Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, after the pet of Change, goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology. Chinas military-run space program plans to use Long March rockets comparable to the Delta IV heavy-lift vehicles used by the Pentagon to send 26-ton payloads, including a trans-lunar rocket, lunar module and lander, into an Earth orbit. In 2011, Beijing launched into space aboard a Long March 2F rocket a space station module weighing 8.5 metric tons that will serve as a prototype for a 60-ton Chinese space lab to be in orbit by 2020. Read More At Investors Business Daily: news.investors/ibd-editorials/081214-712927-china-send-orbiter-moon-and-back.htm#ixzz3ADWzg4Ox Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 22:44:36 +0000
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