China pushes ahead for its Moon mission
China announced plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2030 for lunar scientific exploration, amid its deepening space race with the West and India
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As the US space agency pushes back its timeline to send a manned mission to the Moon, China has roped in Pakistan and Belarus to its Moon programme that aims to construct a permanent lunar base in the 2030s.
In May last year, China announced plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2030 for lunar scientific exploration, amid its deepening space race with the West and India.
China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) programme now has seven nations -- Russia, Belarus, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Venezuela and South Africa -- according to SpaceNews.
It is in direct competition with the NASA-led Artemis Programme, which aims to place astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030.
Pakistan is already involved in China’s Chang’e-6 lunar sample return mission, due to launch in mid-2024. It is also working on the ICUBE-Q cubesat for the mission in cooperation with China’s Shanghai Jiaotong University.
Beijing plans to launch the Chang'e-6 and land it on the Moon in the first half of 2024 to collect samples from the far side of the Moon — which no other country has attempted to date — and to send the Chang'e-7 probe around 2026 to implement resource exploration of the lunar south pole.
