14 DAY TRIAL // As part of its ambitious project, China announced a couple of years ago that it planned to send a lunar exploration vehicle on Earth's natural satellite by 2012, a deadline that draws nearer and nearer with each passing day. A failure to respect it would mean disgrace, so Beijing authorities are currently organizing competitive biddings in which schools and universities throughout the country can partake and win the chance of designing and constructing a specific part of the new Chinese spacecraft.
The announcement was made Wednesday by an official newspaper. Beijing is currently striving to keep up with all the innovations of the space industry. It was only in 2003 that the country managed to complete its first manned spaceflight, which made it only the third nation in the world to be able to send astronauts in orbit aboard its home-built rocket. At the time, not even ESA had this ability, and only Russia and the US had been successful in doing it before.
The current bid in China is to reaffirm the country's importance as a major technological power. And according to the official line of politics, the best way to achieve this is by increasing its presence in orbit and in space. The nation already plans to expand its satellite fleet by 2015, thus creating its own navigation system, much similar to the American GPS. Hopefully, this will prove to be the solution to clearing traffic in some of the world's most clogged cities.
The aerospace program China is currently developing is very secretive, and details of it are scarce. However, intelligence agencies know that it has extensive connections to the military sector. So far, the extent of the “collaboration” is unknown, and will probably remain this way for some time.
Officials in Beijing have announced their intentions of sending astronauts to the Moon in the future, although no official schedule has thus far been advanced for this proposal. For now, the agency is settling for the new lunar mission, which will replace the Chang'e-1 probe that completed its own in October. The previous spacecraft took thousands of lunar orbits without landing on the surface and obtained numerous data, which it then relayed back to Beijing.