08 December 2018
China's Chang'e-4 lunar probe was launched in the early hours of 08 December, and it is expected to make the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the Moon. A Long March-3B rocket, carrying the probe including a lander and a rover, blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province at 2:23 h Beijing Time, opening a new chapter in lunar exploration.
The scientific tasks of the Chang'e-4 mission include low-frequency radio astronomical observation, surveying the terrain and landforms, detecting the mineral composition and shallow lunar surface structure, and measuring the neutron radiation and neutral atoms to study the environment on the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration announced.
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link to launch video
related
China launches Chang'e-4 probe to shed light on Moon's dark side
Backgrounder: China's journeys to the Moon
press release (in German) by University Kiel about its Lunar Lander Neutron Dosimetry experiment on Chang'e 4

07 December 2018
The Kuilong system will link China's Beidou Navigation Satellite System with the Hongyan Satellite Constellation, on which construction will soon begin, said He Xing, Executive Vice-President of China Great Wall Industry Corp, which initiated the Kuilong programme. After the system is completed, Kuilong users will have access to their exact position accurate to about 10 centimeters in less than one minute, no matter where they are, He told China Daily on 6 December on the sidelines of the 6th China Space Forum in Beijing.
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05 December 2018
"The US is returning to the surface of the Moon, and we're doing it sooner than you think!" said Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, last week, while announcing commercial payload partners. However, it's actually China that's going to the Moon sooner than you think. On New Year's Eve, in fact, when may become the first country to land a probe on the undiscovered side of the Moon.
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07 December 2018
In an interview with SpaceWatch.Global, Dr. Scott Pace, the Executive Secretary of the U.S. National Space Council run by U.S. Vice President Michael R. Pence, said that the U.S. does not envision any form of space cooperation with China. “China has good capabilities but the political situation is difficult. As a result, trying to build trust in civil space cooperation is very, very challenging... Not so much a competitor but a potential problem is China. China is becoming increasingly active in commercial space activities and at one level that’s a perfectly normal thing to occur. However, Chinese behaviour in other industrial sectors has had a distorting effect on markets. It has affected patterns of innovation and patterns of ownership.”
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