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.
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.
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