Humanity first reached the moon in 1969. We went back a few times, then lost interest within three short years, and we haven’t been back since. NASA has just flew a quartet of astronauts around the moon last week, and hopes to touch lunar soil by 2028. But the American space program is no longer the only game in town.
China has emerged as another major player in the second race for the Moon. Having mastered human spaceflight 23 years ago, the country’s space program has been moving from strength to strength. A moon landing is on the cards, with the country hoping to plant its boots, and presumably flag, in 2030.
Red Moon
Over the past two decades, China’s space program has racked up a number of impressive feats. It sent rovers to the far side of the moon, landed a rover on Mars, and constructed a liveable space station in Earth orbit. The next obvious crowning achievement would be to land on the Moon, a feat humanity hasn’t accomplished in over 50 years despite endless advances in our technology since.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) stated late last year that it was on track to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030. It’s an ambitious timeline, just four years away.
Core to the Chinese effort is the Long March 10 rocket. Developed from the workhorse Long March 5, the super-heavy-lift launch vehicle is to be capable of delivering 70 tonnes of payload into lower Earth orbit, or 27 tonnes on a trans-lunar injection (TLI) trajectory. These figures are comparable to NASA’s Space Launch System (95 tonnes LEO, 27 tonnes TLI), though somewhat in the shadow of the mighty Saturn V that launched the Apollo astronauts to the Moon (140 tonnes LEO, 43.5 tonnes TLI).
In standard configuration, the Long March 10 features two boosters, along with first, second, and third stage rockets. Each booster, along with the first stage, features 7 YF-100K rocket engines burning RP-1 and liquid oxygen, for a total of 21 engines firing together at liftoff. The second stage features just two YF-100M engines, again burning RP-1 and liquid oxygen, while the third stage has three YF-75E engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
A test launch of the first stage of the Long March 10 rocket, sans boosters.
Thus far, the Long March 10 has not yet been fully launch tested. A test launch took place in February to verify the performance of the first stage, with the rocket successfully splashing down in the South China Sea after reaching an altitude of 105 km above the Earth’s surface. The first full orbital flight of the Long March 10 is scheduled for later this year.
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Of course, the rocket is just one part of the lunar mission. The Mengzhou spacecraft is the analog of the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM), responsible for putting the crew in orbit around the Moon, with a crew of up to six or seven depending on configuration. It’s designed to then deploy the Lanyue lander, which will actually carry astronauts to the Moon itself.
It will also potentially carry a lunar rover to give Chinese taikonauts the ability to explore a broader area of the Moon. Notably, Lanyue and Mengzhou are designed to be delivered by separate Long March 10 launches. They are intended to rendezvous in a low lunar orbit, with crew transferred from Mengzhou to Lanyue for lunar landing, and then transferred back to Mengzhou for the journey back to Earth. Landing will be akin to the Apollo program, with the crew section of Mengzhou descending under parachutes to an ocean splashdown.
The Same Stuff
The Chinese mission does not differ so severely from any other plan to get to the moon. This is not particularly surprising. The basic physics of the problem has not changed in 50 years, it’s just a matter of building the vehicles to actually do the job and get there. Which is not the same as saying that it’s easy: there is still plenty of work to be done to get the Long March 10, Lanyue, and Mengzhou all ready for the big trip up, and whether or not that can be completed in the next four years remains to be seen.
The timeline might be optimistic, but in some ways, it still sounds more realistic than NASA’s previous 2028 target. Time will tell whether the flag that next waves on the Moon is red and yellow, or red white and blue. Or, perhaps even green, lest one of the countries randomly change their flag in the intervening years. Anything could happen.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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