The regional space race is heating up in Asia with China having launched its first lunar probe on Wednesday. This marked a step closer of Communist Party to fulfilling its ambitions of reaching on the moon.
The Chang’e-1 satellite, named after a Chinese goddess, flew to the moon, lifted off at 6:05 PM on Wednesday. Officials and tourists watched the launching with enthusiasm at a site in Sichuan Province, while state television provided coverage to the rest of the nation. .’The launch was very successful, and everything is proceeding just as planned,’ Wu Ji, director of the Space Science and Applied Research Center, told Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.
Wednesday’s launch marks the first step of a three-stage moon mission. In about 2012 there will be a moon landing with a moon rover. In the third phase, about five years later, another rover will land on the moon and be returned to Earth with lunar soil and stone samples.
The launch shows China is able to build and use the best technology, which has domestic, economic, and military implications and ultimately, it’s about strategic advantage of China. Soon after Wednesday’s launch, Xinhua quoted an unidentified spokesman of the military-run space program as saying China was not interested in a space race and that the probe’s mission was “without any military aims and carrying no military facilities and equipment.”
China is not the only emerging space power in Asia. Last month, Japan stole a bit of China’s thunder by launching its own lunar probe, and India plans its own lunar orbiter next year. Technological development is a motivator for all three countries, but so are nationalistic pride and regional rivalry.
China sent its first satellite into Earth orbit in the 1970s but the space program only seriously took off in the 1980s, growing apace with the booming economy. In 2003, China became only the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to put its own astronauts into space.
But China also alarmed the international community in January when it blasted an old satellite into oblivion with a land-based anti-satellite missile. It was the first such test ever conducted by any nation.
