An analytical article in Space Daily takes stock of seven years of China’s space program. The focus is not on plans, but on completed missions—with scientific results and established infrastructure in space.
Our own space station
China completed construction of the Tiangong modular space station in less than a year and a half. The Tianhe core module entered orbit in April 2021, and by November 2022, the T-shaped structure consisting of three modules had been fully assembled. The station continuously hosts crews of three for six-month stints.
Tiangong is significantly smaller than the International Space Station—weighing in at around 70–100 tons, compared to the ISS’s 420 tons. But another important point is that China has become the second country, after the former Soviet Union, to have built and operate a manned orbital station on its own, without international partners.
The far side of the Moon
In January 2019, the Chang’e-4 lander made the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the Moon—inside the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole–Aitken basin. Direct communication with Earth is impossible there, so the Queqiao relay satellite was launched in advance into a halo orbit near the L2 Lagrange point of the Earth-Moon system.
The Yutu-2 rover has transmitted the first direct measurements of the regolith and subsurface structure of the far side, including ground-penetrating radar profiles, which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Scientists are still determining whether the rocks studied are mantle material, but this data has already been put to use.
The youngest Cretaceous rocks
In December 2020, the Chang’e-5 mission brought 1,731 grams of lunar regolith back to Earth—the first new samples in 44 years, since the Soviet Luna 24 returned in 1976. Analysis of basalts from the Mons Rümker volcanic massif in Oceanus Procellarum, the largest basalt “sea” on the Moon’s near side, has determined that they are approximately two billion years old.
This has significantly altered our scientific understanding. Most previous models did not account for volcanic activity on the Moon during such a late period, and the mechanism that sustained it is still being investigated.
The Moon for the second time
In June 2024, the Chang’e-6 mission returned 1,935 grams of material from the far side of the Moon—specifically from the Apollo crater in the South Pole-Aitken basin. This marked the first time in history that samples had been brought back from the far side of the Moon. According to preliminary data, the basalts at the landing site are approximately 2.8 billion years old.
The mission carried instruments developed by French, Swedish, and Italian scientists. This shows that even amid geopolitical tensions, scientific cooperation does not come to a complete halt.
New map of space forces
Space programs around the world are advancing rapidly. NASA has returned astronauts to lunar orbit as part of the Artemis program, retrieved asteroid samples via the OSIRIS-REx mission, and continues to maintain the ISS. India was the first to land a spacecraft near the Moon’s South Pole as part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission in 2023. ESA, JAXA, and ISRO have their own capabilities.
The “space race between two nations” no longer reflects reality. Today, there are several independent space agencies operating in space, each with different priorities, capabilities, and rates of development.
According to spacedaily.com
