MOSCOW, July 1 British Space Command chief Paul Godfrey said China could start mining on the Moon and asteroids in the coming decades, the newspaper writes. times.
«China has released a white paper that looks at the most important minerals on the Moon. They have already brought samples from the Moon to Earth. They just want to go further in this direction. Mining on asteroids will become a reality in our lifetime,» he said. Godfrey edition.
He added that China and Russia are investing «billions» in space exploration and the creation of space weapons.
The head of the US Space Command, General James Dickinson, told the publication that the Pentagon remains confident in its capabilities amid fears that the US is lagging behind China in the comic race. In addition, Dickinson raised the topic of Russian and Chinese hypersonic weapons.
“Of course, we have seen the demonstration of hypersonic weapons by other countries, in particular China and Russia. We continue to study this area in terms of how we can minimize this type of threat,” Dickinson said.
The Chinese lunar sounding program, called «Chang'e» after the heroine of ancient Chinese myths, includes three stages: a flight around an artificial satellite of the Earth, landing on the Moon and returning from the Moon to Earth. The first lunar satellite, Chang'e-1, was launched in 2007 and operated until 2009. The data he collected allowed Chinese scientists to create, in particular, the first heat map of the moon.
In 2019, China began the next phase of its lunar program — the first ever landing on the far side of the moon. The landing platform and the Yutu-2 lunar rover have successfully worked in uncharted territory for several months and continue to study the moon. Yutu-2 discovered two types of rocks in the lunar mantle on the far side of the Moon, whose existence scientists doubted.
On November 24, 2020, China launched the Chang'e-5 reentry vehicle; on December 1, it landed in a given area on the visible side of the Moon; over the next two days, a lunar soil, which was placed in a special compartment of the module for takeoff. The entire mission took 23 days. The Chang'e-5 probe delivered 1,731 grams of lunar samples to Earth. This is the first spacecraft in 44 years sent behind the Moon's soil. China became the third country after the USA and the USSR, which was able to carry out such a mission.