BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM Blazing towards touchdown at a smoking seven miles a second, the Chang’e 5 returner capsule separated from the service craft high above the coast of South Africa, entered a fiery skip zone off the Arabian Peninsula, transited India and the Himalayan range before parachuting from an altitude of six miles above Inner Mongolia. The capsule hit ground on an isolated, snowy plain in the early hours of December 17, Beijing Time, completing a 23-day journey to the moon and back. Soon a helicopter retrieval crew and off-road vehicles raced to inspect the still-warm craft. A quick brown fox nimbly trotted past the scorched spacecraft shortly after it dropped out of the sky into a pile of snow. Both the four-legged predator and gumdrop-shaped Chang’e 5 return capsule glowed in the infrared range as detected by night-vision cameras. Soon, a bipedal recovery team surrounded the capsule, but it seems wholly fitting, thou
November 23, 2020 launch of China’s Chang'e-5 from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Hainan (published in the Asia-Pacific Journal, December 1, 2020) CHINA SHOOTS THE MOON BY PHIL CUNNINGHAM Abstract: With China’s Chang’e 5 rocket launch, which landed on the moon on December 1, the long US-Russian domination of space has a major challenger. The issues extend beyond national pride to a global leadership initiative in rocketry whose implications extend to military, economic and diverse scientific applications at a time of mounting US-China rivalry in all spheres. Keywords: China, US, Russia, Space Program, Great Power Conflict China’s Challenge to US-Russia Space Exploration Hegemony China is taking aim at the moon, establishing itself as a space power to be reckoned with. While currently playing catch-up behind the space accomplishments of the US and Russia, it is rapidly gaining ground as a result of an ambitious Chinese space program coinciding with domestic