China plans to build a nuclear power plant on the moon to fuel a research station it intends to open with Russia there, a senior official confirmed.
No Chinese astronaut has ever set foot on the moon – but within 10 years China aims to have a permanent lunar base on its surface.
From there the ‘Inernational Lunar Research Station’ (ILRS), China hopes to launch manned missions to other planets.
‘An important question for the ILRS is power supply’, Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program, said this week.
‘In this Russia has a natural advantage, when it comes to nuclear power plants, especially sending them into space, it leads the world, it is ahead of the United States.’
But the USA has its own plans in motion. The only country to land people on the moon, the US hasn’t sent a mission there since 1972.
Now it wants to land two astronauts on the moon’s surface in 2027, with a proposed base to follow later.
The USA’s history in space is long, but China has made rapid progress this century.
China’s Shenzhou 5 mission in 2003 made it only the third country with that ability.
A decade later it landed the Chang’e 3 robotic rover on the moon. Then China sent one to Mars, where they plan to send humans by 2033.
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If China does manage to build a nuclear power plant on the moon, it could open up new doors for space travel.
Yury Borisov, former head of Russia’s Roscosmos, said last year: ‘This huge, cyclopean structure would be able, thanks to a nuclear reactor and high-power turbines, to transport large cargos from one orbit to another, collect space debris and engage in many other applications.’
One of the reasons countries are competing to gain a foothold on the moon is the natural resources they could exploit there, according to Royal Museums Greenwich.
The moon is believed to contain deposits of metal oxides, silicon, titanium, rare earth metals and aluminium – plus enough helium-3 to ‘solve humanity’s energy demand for around 10,000 years’, according to one of China’s top lunar scientists Ouyang Ziyuan.
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