22 July 2019
Head of China's lunar exploration programme, Wu Weiren, wished India's landing on the Moon success after the South Asian country's successful launch of a rocket carrying its latest generation of lunar probe Chandrayaan 2. Wu made the statement on the sidelines of the 4th International Conference on Lunar and Deep Space Exploration which kicked off on 22 July and is to be concluded on 24 July in Zhuhai, South China's Guangdong Province. "The international trend will not play a decisive role in China's planning on its lunar missions, and China is not going to compete with any one over the matter," Wu said. "China will pace itself against plans that have been already laid out in advance with each step surely achieving set goals."
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19 July 2019
Marsha Freeman is analysing in her article for the "Executive Intelligence Review" the history and development of China's Lunar Exploration Programme - CLEP. She is explaining the motivations and ambitions which drove China to take on lunar exploration and she gives an outlook what the country will gain from science and technology conducted on the Moon.
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19 July 2019
Justin Key Canfil is a PhD Candidate in Columbia University’s Department of Political Science is conducting research on how media and the public in the US are reflecting on China's space activities. He argues that those reflections are not in line with the current "hawkish discourse on space competition" in political or institutional language in the US: "...the evidence suggests that other states’ successes have the potential to bridge divides by building mutual respect, even when tensions run hot."
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19 July 2019
By the end of 2019, Brazil and China will launch CBERS-4a, the sixth satellite in the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) programme that this year celebrates 20 years since the first, CBERS-1, was sent to space. Using data from CBERS satellites, the Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE) announced recently that deforestation rates in the Amazon rose 88% between June 2018 and the same month this year, the highest in years.
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20 July 2019
An interesting read is this article from 23 April 2016 which outlines the early efforts and the political context of the beginnings of China's space programme.
"In 1957 and 1958, the Soviet Union and the United States each launched their first satellites, officially starting a space race. Mao Zedong was quick to pronounce, "We too shall make satellites." Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences scrambled to turn those words into reality. They aimed to launch their first probe in 1960. Publicly, few at the time deemed the goal far-fetched. But it was the Great Leap Forward, a period of exaggerated agricultural and industrial ambitions."
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