14 DAY TRIAL // According to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, the next manned mission to set foot on the Moon by the end of the next century might not be coordinated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but by China. Dr. Griffin further points out that if China wants to put a man on the Moon before the American space agency's scheduled mission, then it is more than capable of doing so. China became the third nation in the world ever to send a man into space nearly five years ago and has almost finished mapping the surface of the Moon with the help of its Chang'e 1 orbiter, launched towards the end of last year.
"Certainly it is possible that if China wants to put people on the Moon, and if it wishes to do so before the United States, it certainly can. As a matter of technical capability, it absolutely can," said Dr. Griffin in a recent interview, although China states that it has no official objective of putting a man on the Moon any time soon but neither does it deny such a possibility in the future, although it does not believe it is capable of such a feat before the end of 2020.
"I'm not a psychologist, so I can't say if it matters or not. That would just be an opinion and I don't want to air an opinion in an area that I'm not qualified to discuss," said Dr. Griffin referring to a possible race to the Moon between the two countries.
NASA has been the spearhead of space exploration for decades, although in the last years it has lost considerable ground in favor of other space agencies throughout the world, says a report made by the Futron consultancy firm. Since 2003, China has carried out five manned missions in space and yet another one is scheduled to take place in October.
NASA and China National Space Administration are currently trying to establish a collaboration in the area of space exploration.
"We do have some early co-operative initiatives that we are trying to put in place with China, mostly centered around scientific enterprises. I think that's a great place to start. I think we're always better off if we can find areas where we can collaborate rather than quarrel. I would remind your audience that the first US-Soviet human co-operation took place in 1975, virtually at the height of the Cold War. And it led, 18 years later, to discussions about an International Space Station (ISS) programme in which we're now involved," added Dr. Griffin.
Meanwhile, other Asian countries such as India and Japan are also aspiring towards their own space programs, although while JAXA is already at its second spacecraft placed in the Moon's orbit, India's Chandrayaan probe is expected to launch towards the end of the current year.
Dr. Michael Griffin was named NASA's administrator in 2005, and has since started the implementation of the President Bush's Vision of Space Exploration, involving the return to the Moon by 2020 and putting a man on Mars sometime in the near future. At the same time, Dr. Griffin has overseen the plans to finish the construction of the International Space Station and the retirement of the US space shuttle as well as the build of the Orion and Ares spacecraft scheduled to replace the orbiter by 2015.
This basically means that for a period of five years the US will have no spacecraft capable of space flight. "Even if a new president and a new Congress decided they wanted to shorten the gap between shuttle retirement and Ares and Orion deployment, at this point with water over the dam, even if they were substantially increasing our funding, we would be talking about 2014 as the earliest," he said about the turned down proposal made by NASA last year which could have shortened this period to only three years.