The director of the US space agency, Bill Nelson, warned in an interview with the press (to the German newspaper Bild) that China intends to build a lunar base in collaboration with Russia in what would be a first step to “seize” the satellite. .
“We must be very worried that China is going to land on the Moon to say: now it’s ours and you stay out.” According to the director of NASA, there is already a new space race like the one experienced during the Cold War, but instead of the Soviet Union against the United States between 1950 and 1970, the opponent, in this case, is China and the moment , now, with the new space race to reconquer the Moon with human presence.
China has not taken the accusations lightly.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a press release: “This is not the first time that the head of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration ignores the facts and speaks irresponsibly about China. The US side has constantly built a smear campaign against China’s normal and reasonable space efforts, and China firmly opposes such irresponsible remarks.”
The accusations from NASA administrator Bill Nelson did not end there. Nelson also said that Chinese astronauts are being trained to destroy other countries’ satellites and that the nation “has stolen ideas and technology from others” in order to claim the Moon.
Regarding this accusation, Chinese spokesman Zhao Lijian commented that Beijing has always advocated the peaceful use of outer space and opposed its arms buildup.
“The development of China’s space industry has been fully achieved through independence and self-reliance, and its rights and achievements cannot be questioned or discredited in any way,” Zhao said.
race for the moon
At that time, the United States became the first and only country to put a human being on the surface of the moon and humanity has not set foot on selenite soil since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, specifically on December 14, 1972. The last human being on the Moon was Commander Eugene Cernan who died in 2017 at the age of 82.
NASA is apparently seeing a growing threat in the space race from China, as it has been the most recent space agency to land on the Moon. And it is that China has been the second country to plant its flag on the surface of the Moon (more than 50 years after the United States did). The camera of Chang’e-5, the capsule that has taken samples in a previously unexplored area of the Moon, took a snapshot of precisely the Chinese national emblem on the surface of the Moon.
The Chang’e 5 spacecraft was launched on November 24, 2020 by a Long March-5 rocket, which has already successfully carried the first Chinese mission to Mars, Tianwen-1, into space and in December of that same year became in the third country in the world to manage to collect lunar samples, after the United States and the Soviet Union ( Moon 24 in 1976).
The US space agency plans to land humans on the Moon in 2025 , while China is looking to 2030 to send its first astronauts. And apart from the Moon, both nations are also looking towards the red planet, Mars. In June 2021, China announced that it plans to send its first manned mission to Mars in 2033 with the goal of building a base and extracting resources from the planet. NASA, meanwhile, is using its Artemis mission to send the first Americans to Mars, also by 2033, so it will be a race between the US and China to see which one lands first.
Welcome to the new space race.
