Russia and China have unveiled plans for a joint lunar space station as Moscow seeks to recapture the glory of its space pioneering days of Soviet times, and Beijing gears up its own extraterrestrial ambitions.
The International Scientific Lunar Station that Russia and China will work on is “a complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon,” Roscosmos said in a statement. It will be designed to support a variety of research experiments “with the possibility of long-term unmanned operation with the prospect of a human presence on the moon,” the statement said.
Like NASA, China has been courting international support for its own plans to put infrastructure on the Moon. It’s also sent several robotic Chang’e missions to the Moon, including the first landing on the Moon’s far side and a swift sample retrieval mission in December.
The lunar space station agreement, signed virtually between China’s space chief Zhang Kejian and Russia’s space chief Dmitry Rogozin, marks the latest development in Beijing’s efforts to explore the Moon alongside rivals like NASA, which is barred from working with China under a law passed by Congress in 2011.
Russia, which has maintained a decades-long partnership with NASA on the International Space Station, has been reluctant to extend its space alliance with the US to the Moon.
The Russian space agency Roscomos said in a statement on Tuesday it signed an agreement with China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) to develop a “complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon”.
CNSA, for its part, said the project was “open to all interested countries and international partners” in what experts said would be China’s biggest international space cooperation project to date.
Russia is seeking to retake the lead in the space race.
The Russia-China agreement greenlights joint development of their own lunar space station, which calls for “planning, demonstration, design, development, implementation, and operation of scientific research station projects, including project promotion to the international aerospace community,” a statement from the China National Space Administration said.
It was unclear what specific technical contributions would be made by Russia, whose military-civil space agency has been investing in new launch infrastructure despite a domestic climate of budgetary rollbacks. Russia’s space budget ranks third globally, behind the United States and China.
China also held talks with France’s space agency CNES as a “status check of the bilateral space cooperation between the two agencies,” CNES said on Tuesday. Among cooperation on climate science, Beijing’s Kejian and France’s space chief Jean-Yves Le Gall also discussed “other potential areas for cooperation in relation to the Moon and Mars,” the statement said.
