China lands Chang'e 6 sample-return probe on far side of the moon

https://www.space.com/china-change-6-lands-on-moon-far-side-sample-return-mission

by divbzero • 2 years ago

116 65 2 years ago

WhoAmThing• 2 years ago

Does this mark the moment in history where China has now surpassed the US and is the new global superpower?

The scale and rate at which China is innovating in space, science, and technology is pretty compelling for the majority of the world.

upon_drumhead• 2 years ago

If it wasn't for SpaceX, perhaps, but with SpaceX in the equation, no, it doesn't shift any geopolitical power.

audunw2• 2 years ago

Even without SpaceX I think USA is well ahead of China in this area. There are many other companies and projects well ahead of what China is doing.

khuey• 2 years ago

Does this mark the moment in history where China has now surpassed the US and is the new global superpower?

Why would it? The US returned rocks from the moon over half a century ago.

rockemsockem• 2 years ago

And better yet, returned rocks from an asteroid in the last couple years.

gravescale7• 2 years ago

I'd reserve transferring the title for being first to hit industrially-useful fusion power, but I'd also accept a permanent non-LEO space colony.

Which is to say, I'm not holding my breath for a handover just yet.

philistine2• 2 years ago

I’m looking at the amount of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

When China has that much projected power across the globe, we’ll talk. For the moment, they’d still end up in a Ukraine-sized boondoggle if they invaded Taiwan.

akira2501• 2 years ago

the new global superpower?

China has rather deftly avoided the dumb "global" conflicts the US has needlessly boondoggled itself in over the past 3 decades. I think they've mostly sidestepped this question. For now.

seanmcdirmid4• 2 years ago

China has rather deftly avoided the dumb "global" conflicts the US has needlessly boondoggled itself in over the past 3 decades.

China hasn’t really avoided these, they have rather gotten involved in completely different ones. The good news is that their last border skirmish with Russia was around 25 years ago.

ssijak• 2 years ago

"past 3 decades"

you mean from the founding of the country, but especially in the last ~80 years globally.

hoseja• 2 years ago

And thusly lacks three decades of military experience. The adventurism was always about that, adventure and keeping the MIC fed.

dragonelite• 2 years ago

Off course China has been a global superpower for at least 4~5 years now, doesn't mean the US isn't a global super power anymore. The US is still the biggest super power in culture and science. But its not relative big enough anymore in military compared to say Russia and China's size that it can dictate the world what will and what wont happen.

NicoJuicy• 2 years ago

Perhaps China, but Russia is entirely dependent on them.

Russia isn't the USSR anymore for a long time, where it's GDP was the same as the US.

_joel5• 2 years ago

Russia are definitely not the military super power the west thought they were. Ukraine's "3 day long" special military operation that's now 800+ days of brutal war has shown that. The tatics they use consist of human meat waves, hardly scalable to a world context.

paganel• 2 years ago

They’ve (the Americans) have been losing it for 7 or 8 years or so, if news about the Houthis being able to have hit USS Eisenhower turns out to be true (which would be a first hit on an US carrier since 1945) then things would be even more obvious to the general population.

surfingdino• 2 years ago

The US and the rest of the West are not prepared for guerilla warfare deployed by nation states. We've been reorganising our military to face advanced armies equipped with state-of-the-art technology whereas our enemies are not quite advanced. So we find ourselves in a situation where we can deploy a few dozen AT-STs against millions of drunken Ewoks with AK-47s. It's a tricky situation, because we developed weapons and strategies that prioritise surgical hits that minimise civilian losses while the enemies treat people as disposable assets and killing civilians is not a consideration for them. I wouldn't be so cocky if I was Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or Houthi. If the western military switches gears into kill'em all mode all the little shits who want rule the world by terror will find themselves with bigger problems.

philistine2• 2 years ago

Hitting an aircraft carrier in a busy traffic area with close shores is not impossible and a great morale boost. But have they sunk it? Taken it of action? Damaged it in any way?

audunw2• 2 years ago

Innovating?

China still seems to be mostly in a catching up and copying phase.

Not to say their accomplishments are anything but impressive. But look at the space station they’re building. Impressive achievement, but a fairly conservative design. Meanwhile the US has worked on inflatable space station modules, and it seems like that USA will make commercial space stations well before China.

For what I’ve seen USA has far more innovate designs in the works for rocket engines, rockets, spacecraft, space planes, space stations, satellites, etc.

There are impressive innovations from China too, in the space of quad copters, solar power, robot vacuums, EVs, etc. But all-in-all it feels to me that their advanced innovations from all of China isn’t much beyond what we see from much smaller countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Not that amazing considering their population size.

Their population is now shrinking, the economy is getting worse, they have an insane level of debt (especially when including shadow banking), they don’t do real immigration, they’re getting more hostile to expats, they have some brain drain, ... I suspect we’re seeing peak China.

Dalewyn2• 2 years ago

Being in denial and bitching about what isn't denied, instead of taking steps to stay on top and specifically ahead of China, is a great way to lose and lose harder when the US (and the west at large) still has (soon to be had) a chance.

Unless you're a politician running for office, you don't win by arguing your opponent is shit and debilitated and losing and then proceed to do nothing.

lyu072822• 2 years ago

Why does this read like a child defending his dad before other children? Propaganda and nationalist ideology really makes people sound like children. Liberals prediction of china's economic collapse is especially funny, you have predicted china's imminent collapse for decades, at some point you should realize that western "economics" is a faith-based cult that can't predict anything.

shunia_huang3• 2 years ago

Intrestingly reading the news first here rather than from a local media as a Chinese.

And after this I try to find news on lcoal media and where I normally get news from, but it's obviously not on any front page or things like that.

It is fun.

verisimi• 2 years ago

Isn't this sort of thing considered important news on China?

shunia_huang3• 2 years ago

It definitely is, it's just seems not that important as we had like the previous human or rocket lunches, and I don't know why.

gravescale7• 2 years ago

It's the top headline slot (well, one of three in a rotating carousel thingy) at http://news.cctv.com right now.

(But, full disclosure, I actually read it at Slashdot first).

fastball2• 2 years ago

Wow Slashdot still exists?

shunia_huang3• 2 years ago

I mean, who would uses news.cctv.com in China, people get news from a lot of sources but no, this does not belong to that list.

I did find out that cctv published two news through there wechat channel, but they just get flooded in the feeds.

danielpetrica2• 2 years ago

It's nice to see progress in space exploration. I saw the landing footage and is beautiful. Congratulations for a nice achievement to the people working on this project

gravescale7• 2 years ago

I'm always blown away by these missions. So much has to go so right, in extreme conditions and almost entirely autonomously, with every fault path considered and accounted for as best as possible.

And no-one to give the drill a bit of a wiggle if it's stuck.

I'd kill for a fully detailed machined metal scale model (but I know I couldn't afford it: edit: actually, 500 yuan ish from Taobao, perhaps not fully detailed, but I'm tempted).

imtringued• 2 years ago

Stop! That is the "Old Space" approach. The "New Space" approach is better and faster. Just ship it and try again, if it doesn't work. Oh wait...

SiempreViernes2• 2 years ago

Sadly to me this success isn't so much indicative of progress in space exploration (this effort isn't part of a coordinated international project), but rather a reminder that soon we'll hear about US politicians talking about how to fight the Chinese on the moon.

I've already head national "security" experts talk of "hostile Chinese action on the moon" (without specifying further) and "Chinese efforts to control cislunar space" (again without clarifying what that would involve).

Further, citing the need to counter China the US has announced plans to send military satellites to "patrol" the Earth-Moon L2 point (a surveillance satellite as well as an ASAT capable satellite).

In other words, the US is well on its way to bring war to the Moon.

gravescale7• 2 years ago

isn't part of a coordinated international project

Maybe not "coordinated" but they do have some collaboration with Italian, French, Swedish and Pakistani teams on this one.

Chang'e 7 has Egyptian/Bahraini, Italian, Swiss, Thai, Russian and an international lunar group's payloads.

The Wolf Amendment makes it impossible for NASA to cooperate with China at all, so a competitive stance is really the best we can hope for (the worse alternative bring an outright adversarial one), unless the ESA can wiggle a stabilising middle path between the two sides.

Without clarifying what that would involve

I imagine ASAT weapons around L2 would fit that bill!

danielpetrica2• 2 years ago

They collaborated with several countries including Italy

lyu072822• 2 years ago

Drilling 2 meters down for samples on the moon is pretty impressive. I believe there are also some samples lying around Mars ready for pickup and return in a few years. I'm far less excited and more worried about Artemis, it's so clearly the wrong approach smh

rcarmo• 2 years ago

Yep. And bringing back samples of different cheese^Wregolith might provide additional insights as to its formation (although 2 meters might not seem very impressive, it might span millions of years of undisturbed “soil” deposition)

gravescale7• 2 years ago

I dunno, 2 metres sounds pretty impressive to me. That's just over 1 MJ (Michael Jordan). Remotely, in vacuum, in stony electrostically evil regolith which might also be big solid bits and no takebacksies on the drilling site.

Apollo 17 was three metres deep, but they had a meatbag-in-a-bag to feed in drill segments and keep things under control. Which has its own tricky technicalities to keep the meat fresh and moving, to be sure. But it does simplify the other mechanisms.

Oarch• 2 years ago

Bit disappointing I've not read any conspiracy theories on this yet.

China. Dark side of the moon. Seems ripe, shall we get one going?

93po• 2 years ago

it's a country full of pink floyd fans

China lands Chang'e 6 sample-return probe on far side of the moon

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