Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

Chinese Long March Rocket ( Image credits- VOA) Source- The Diplomat Author- Dr. Namrata Goswami China’s space ambitions and goals are unique. Unlike the space rivalry between the United States and the former USSR, which was mostly about “who got where first” (prestige and status) as well as geopolitical rivalry, China’s space ambition is to harness the vast resources available in space to benefit and sustain its economic rise. When Sputnik burst into the skies on October 4, 1957, it took the United States by surprise. For one, the U.S. considered itself to be the leaders in science and technology; for another, the U.S believed that the USSR was a poor, peasant-based economy, incapable of cutting-edge space technology. Sputnik was a shocker as it showcased the Soviet Union’s high-end technology, skyrocketing its international prestige and aggravating U.S. fears that the USSR could now use rockets to transfer inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to space, from

Long March Rocket ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / Attributes- Author ) Source- The Diplomat Author- Jan Mortier & Benjamin Finnis In October 2014, China’s Chang’e 5-T1 lunar probe, known as Xiaofei or Little Flyer, successfully completed an orbit around the Moon. This was the first time that a trip around the Moon and back of this sort had been made since the USA and Russian trips in the 1970s. The Little flyer is a precursor to Chang’e 5 which will bring back lunar soil (regolith) containing the nuclear fuel helium-3 that can be used for baseload energy production and the next generation of nuclear weapons. The Little Flyer mission lasted eight days and its primary objective was to conduct atmospheric re-entry tests on the Chang’e 5 capsule design which will be launched by 2017. The destination on the lunar surface for Chang’e 5, like that of the Yutu Jade Rabbit rover, is the Mare Imbrium also known as the Sea of Rains, one of the vast lunar crater seas vi