07 January 2019
China started out the year by doing something that no nation has done before: It landed a spacecraft and an accompanying rover on the far side of the moon with an ambitious scientific payload package and an exciting mission ahead to study the interior structure of the moon with the help of ground-penetrating radar, among other things. Almost equally impressive from a technical standpoint, China successfully placed a communication relay satellite into a lunar halo orbit to enable the command of, and communication with, both the spacecraft and rover, which do not have line-of-sight views of Earth for direct radio contact. I had mixed feelings about these events. Now we have come to the moment of China's ascendency in space exploration. We must face the reality that it has, in a small but significant way, shown the world that it can be the first to accomplish things in space, too.
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