Chinese Spacecraft Enters Orbit Around the Moon

mpicpp sends this report from Scientific American: A Chinese spacecraft service module has entered orbit around the moon, months after being used in the country's landmark test flight that sent a prototype sample-return capsule on a flight around the moon and returned it to Earth. The service module from China's circumlunar test flight arrived in orbit around the moon this week, according to Chinese state media reports. The spacecraft is currently flying in an eight-hour orbit that carries it within 125 miles (200 kilometers) of the lunar surface at its closest point, and out to a range of 3,293 miles (5,300 km) at its highest point. Earlier reports noted that a camera system is onboard the service module, designed to assist in identifying future landing spots for the Chang'e 5 mission that will return lunar samples back to Earth in the 2017 time frame. Reader schwit1 adds a detailed report on Russia's next-gen space station module, writing, "The Russians have always understood that a space station is nothing more than a prototype of an interplanetary spaceship. They are therefore simply carrying through with the same engineering research they did on their earlier Salyut and Mir stations, developing a vessel that can keep humans alive on long trips to other planets."

Comments

Great to see

[SuperKendall]

Glad to see someone is returning to the Moon, no matter which nation. We need more space exploration in general.

Re:Great to see

[Michael Woodhams]

Since 1969 there have been people living on Earth who have visited another world. It would be a terrible failure of humanity if one day this was no longer true. I am not fond of the Chinese government, but if they send people to the moon, I'll be enthusiastically cheering them on.

Re:Great to see

[Teancum]

America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard. There are some efforts to try and build some new spacecraft that might actually be useful in the future and they are currently under development, but none of them are flight worthy. If some alien creature was discovered orbiting the Earth and simply asking for somebody from the Earth to meet with them in orbit in exchange for huge amounts of cultural and scientific data, it would have to be done right now with a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft or with a Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft. America wouldn't and simply can't do something like that.

Yes, the technological capability of going to the Moon has been lost in the past 40 years and needs to be rebuilt from scratch. All we know is that it was done in the past, where sadly an entire generation of kids are starting to believe the Moon hoax guys because the technology to get to the Moon no longer exists.

Re:Great to see

[itzly]

America wouldn't and simply can't do something like that

It's not really a matter of technology that has been lost, rather than safety requirements that have been increased to the point that nothing passes them right now.

Re:Great to see

[ShanghaiBill]

The technology to land on other planets has absolutely receded. We are kind of starting from scratch.

There is an active rover on Mars that would disagree with you if it was sentient.
We do not lack the technology to land on other planets.
What we lack is a reason to include humans in the landings.
The robots are doing fine without us.

Re:Great to see

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Chinese (well, Hong Konger, but after the fucking handover now I'm technically Chinese) and I've worked in the mainland, so listen to me. China is NOT communist. Not even close. Sure, the Communist Party is in power there, but they are just crooks. If you actually go to the mainland you can see the elders walking the streets, begging for money and food. It's everywhere, from the biggest city to the little town. A communist government would actually care about these people and provided them shelter, foods, health care, and so on. And on the other hand, you see the CPC people with thousand dollars hand bags, luxary goods (all imported, because despite the CPC says China is the best nation in Earth they don't like or trust China's products), 5 star meals every night cooked by chefs who make maybe 300 USD a month. There's no way China is even close to Communism. It's a corrupted dictatorship.

Re:Great to see

[KeensMustard]

We stopped sending humans to space because technology progressed and humans are no longer needed.

How can you say that technology has receded? That is so far from the facts that I cannot believe that you said that deliberately.

Did you forget that last year we landed on a Comet? Did you forgot the Titan Landing, the minor issue of our presence on Mars for what - 15 continuous years now? Did you forget Cassin, Voyager, MESSENGER? Did you forget that even at this moment we are on the brink of our first good look at Pluto?

You live in a bizarre world.

Re: Success rate of 0%

[bitflusher]

To add to this: Mocking the only nation currently capable of bringing humans to the iss for their incompetence seems odd..

Re:Success rate of 0%

[kellymcdonald78]

No, the Russian's were hoping to do a manned flyby as part of the Zond program, but the Proton rocket had a number of teething problems and it took awhile to become reliable enough to even consider putting people on (ultimately it never flew manned). There were also a number of problems with the Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft. US intelligence thought the Soviet's were closer to flying a crewed lunar flyby mission as Zond 5 was largely a successful test. However Zond 6 depressurized and crashed on re-entry (killing the animals aboard) which ended any immediate plans of a crewed launch. Apollo 8 was originally to be a "D" mission, testing the Lunar Module in Low Earth Orbit with Apollo 9 an "E" mission testing it in Medium Earth Orbit. Due to delays with the Lunar Module, they decided to swap the missions and instead send Apollo 8 into lunar orbit (with no Lunar Module). Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to leave low Earth orbit Dec 21st, 1968. They successfully orbited the moon 10 times on Christmas day and returned Dec 27th After that the Soviet's pretty much gave up on the flyby in favor of a manned lunar landing, but they could never get the N-1 rocket to work