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Chinese Set Sights on Moon

The People?s Republic of China has announced that it will work toward landing a man on the moon by the year 2024. The Communist country in 2003 became only the third nation to be able to launch its own astronauts into orbit, after Russia and the United States, and Beijing now says that it has the technology and the economy to undertake such a mission to the lunar surface, unlike the China of 1957, which former Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong said couldn?t even launch a potato into space (this was right after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world?s first artificial satellite).

Chinese plans to travel to the moon come not so long after U.S. President George W. Bush committed the United States to return to the lunar surface, and even one day travel to the distant red planet, Mars. The Chinese economy is one of the fastest growing on the planet, and Chinese growth coupled with a drive to the moon could spark an ongoing competition between the People?s Republic and the United States similar to that which existed in the 1960s ? that is, a new space race. In the 1960s the space race was between the U.S., a democracy, and the U.S.S.R., a Communist country. Comparisons are surely valid.

The space program of the United States has suffered as of late from the Columbia space shuttle re-entry tragedy in February 2003 and the need to replace the ageing space shuttle fleet with something hopefully cheaper and yet still more efficient than the expensive shuttle program. Current designs for a new space vehicle to replace the shuttles are actually quite similar to the Apollo ?Saturn? rocket designs of the 1960s, when powerful three-stage rockets took Americans into orbit and helped send them all the way to the moon.