Why China is obsessed by the Moon

THERE were both cheers and tears among the technicians at the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre as China’s Chang’e 4 space craft touched down on the lunar surface yesterday morning. After all they had pulled off a feat that no other space programme had been able to achieve: land a rover on the so-called dark side of the moon. Shortly afterwards the probe began sending back never-seen-before pictures of its dusty surface pockmarked by craters. 

To the layman they may come across as rather bleak images of a desolate landscape, but to China’s leaders they held the promise of great power and riches.

For this mission could be Beijing’s first step in laying claim to the vast lunar resources that are waiting to be exploited by the smartest and fastest global powers.

The moon’s treasure trove of metals includes gold, iron, platinum and tungsten but the big money is in a gas called helium-3.

While gold is currently priced at £1,000 an ounce, conservative estimates have put the value of the precious gas at a whopping £50,000 per ounce. 

No surprise when you consider that some experts reckon that 40 tonnes of helium-3, or He-3, would be enough to satisfy the US’s power needs for an entire year.

Quite simply a steady supply of this gas could solve the world’s energy crises for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Most people will be familiar with helium-4, the gas that makes balloons rise, but its cousin, He-3, is rare because very little reaches our surface because of the atmosphere and Earth’s magnetic fields.

Our stocks are believed to total only a few hundred kilograms while the moon has at least one million tonnes of reserves. 

The leader of China’s space agency once admitted publicly, perhaps in error, that He-3 could meet the country’s energy requirements, through nuclear fusion, for 10,000 years.

Now the space race is on to see how feasible it is to get the gas back to earth – with China leading the way.

Gathering up gas-rich moon dust in solar-powered moon vehicles promises to be a comparatively easy trick to pull off.

But how would you then heat it up to 600C in order to release the gas and then transport it back to Earth?

Heaving all that mining hardware nearly 240,000 miles into space seems way beyond the reach of China, Russia or Nasa at the moment, but by 2025 it may well be achievable.

Some estimates have said the cost of such a programme would be £12billion, which is not a prohibitive sum for a Chinese government that currently spends billions a year on importing oil.

The logical next step would be to invest in a fleet of space freighters capable of shuttling the precious cargo back to the homeland in the coming decades.

The first images from Chang’e-4 were being pored over by experts at the China National Space Administration last night as they took an important leap towards realising the big dream.

Although China, along with 101 other countries, has signed a 1967 UN treaty that says no country should “appropriate” the moon the document is vague when it comes to exploiting minerals.

Ironically, a forward thinking British company could benefit from the laxness. Oxford-based Reaction Engines is behind Skylon, a reusable spacecraft capable of carrying a cargo of up to 12 tonnes.

Their spacecraft could be operational by 2024, by which time companies such as Planetary Resources, backed by Titanic director James Cameron and a number of Google billionaires, may be in a position to use them.

For now China is basking in the international glory of its latest lunar endeavour.

They say they have “lifted a mysterious veil” and opened a new chapter in lunar “exploration”.

After entering the moon’s orbit in mid-December, the probe, which has a lander and a rover, touched down near the moon’s south pole in the Von Kármán crater.

The probe also took six live species – cotton, rapeseed, potato, arabidopsis, fruit fly and yeast – to the lifeless environment to form a mini biosphere.

China insists its space adventures are peaceful, but the US says they aim to prevent other nations from using space-based assets in a crisis.

The US Congress has banned Nasa from two-way cooperation with its Chinese counterpart over security concerns and President Donald Trump wants to create a new “Space Force” by 2020, as the sixth branch of the military.

Trump said in 2017 that he wanted to return astronauts to the lunar surface to build a foundation for an eventual manned Mars mission in the mid-2030s.

In three years time Nasa should start building a new space station laboratory to orbit the moon and operate as a stopping point for missions to distant parts of the solar system.

NASA’S New Horizons explorer successfully “phoned home” on Tuesday after a journey to the most distant world ever explored by humankind, a frozen rock at the edge of the solar system that scientists hope will uncover secrets to its creation.

The nuclear-powered space probe travelled 4 billion miles to get within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule, a snowman shaped 20-mile-long space rock in the uncharted heart of the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy celestial bodies just outside Neptune’s orbit.

China is focusing its efforts closer to home.

Five years ago they made the country’s first lunar soft landing, but its “Jade Rabbit” rover, named after a folklore legend about a rabbit living on the moon, began malfunctioning after several weeks.

It looks as though the new rover will be much more successful.

Indeed, its masters hope the information it sends back will help them plan the next phase of Operation Moonraker, the plundering of the moon – one giant leap on the way to space superpower status.