How China Will Get To the Moon Before a Google Lunar XPrize Winner

An anonymous reader writes in with this link about the advances in China's lunar program. "A $30 million Google-backed competition to land a spacecraft on the moon may be about to be scooped. China's Chang'e 3 probe successfully put itself into lunar orbit on Friday in preparation for an attempted touchdown around Dec. 14. China won't be winning the prize money, which is reserved for privately funded, previously enrolled teams, not government agencies."

Comments

Re:missing the point

[savuporo]

Hmm. Apparently capitalist governments are even more effective at sinking funds into projects like that, because its widely recognized that US beat the Soviets in the early space race.

Of course, for some inexplicable reason US didnt respond to Soviet challenge by leveraging the power of free markets, private industry and entrepreneurial spirit. They decided to beat massive Soviet state run design bureaus backed by their military industry complex by establishing their own massive state run design bureau backed by their military industrial complex. They even bagged members of the same team of germans as their design leads !

Funnily enough, Russians are now launching the lions share of commercial space payloads, whereas the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 first comsat launch was the first in years for US.