Beijing opens up space cooperation (in competition with Washington)

Other countries will also be able to take part in the Chang'e 8 mission that will lay the foundations for the Chinese lunar station in 2026. Meanwhile, Beijing's space station modules will be doubled from three to six. Moves that aim to build alliances to have more say on the hot topic of international regulations on activities in space.

Baku (AsiaNews/Agencies) - China has opened to the international community the possibility of taking part in its Chang'e 8 lunar mission. The news was announced by the Chinese Space Agency (Csna) during the International Astronautical Congress, hosted for the its 74th edition in the Azerbaijani capital.

The Chang'e missions, which take their name from the Moon goddess of Chinese tradition, aim to explore our planet's natural satellite and began in 2007, with the entry into lunar orbit of the Chang'e 1 probe Chang'e 8 will follow Chang'e 7 in 2026. The two missions, which have the task of studying possible resources in the south pole of the Moon, will be fundamental for the future construction of the International Lunar Research Station (Ilrs), the lunar base sponsored by China, which Beijing has hypothesized for the early 1930s.

As reported by Csna, the cooperation between China and its international partners for Chang'e 8 will give priority to three types of mission: exploration of the lunar surface through spacecraft, which also includes joint initiatives; missions for research, extraction and collection of samples using lunar robots; other advanced scientific cooperation projects with the production of scientific payload useful for the Chang'e 8 Mission and complementary to the Chinese payload.

Interested countries have been invited to send their proposals by the end of the year, while a final selection will be made by September 2024.

The opening to the participation of third countries in the Chang'e 8 mission constitutes an initiative of immense strategic importance for Beijing. The goal is to increase international recognition of its space program. China, excluded from the International Space Station (ISS) due to US fears linked to the military apparatus of the Communist Party, needs to create a context within which China can be recognized as a space power and can therefore participate in legislating for principles of space exploration and exploitation.

The intention - announced yesterday by Beijing - to expand its space station from three to six modules in the coming years also goes in the same direction, thus offering astronauts from other nations an alternative platform to the International Space Station (which is approaching the end of its life cycle).

Space-related activities are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and this makes international regulations on the subject an urgent matter, however hampered by a profound fragmentation of legal systems and priorities. Being protagonists in space legislation therefore means establishing the rules for its exploitation, an opportunity that Beijing cannot pass up.

Beijing took its first step into space in 1964, at the height of the Cold War. Since then it has become one of the few countries to reach Mars and the only one to reach the dark side of the Moon thanks to the Chang'e 4 mission. Not only that, thanks to the Space Innovation Corridor initiative, which allows participating countries to access satellites or to obtain the possibility of carrying out space launches, space science also constitutes an extremely relevant aspect of the Belt and Road Initiative. Today, therefore, the space program constitutes a key element of Xi Jinping's policy who considers it an integral part of the Chinese dream (中国梦) given its relevance for the security, development and prestige of the country.

Photo: Wikipedia / China News Service