China and Russia want to build a shared moon base.
The two countries agree on Tuesday (March 9) with the plans, saying the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) will be “open to all interested countries and international partners.”
The “Memorandum of Understanding” between the two countries, China National Space Administration (CNSA), describes the ILRS as a “comprehensive scientific experiment base with the capability of long-term autonomous operation, built on the lunar surface and / or on the lunar orbit that will conduct multidisciplinary and multi-objective scientific research activities such as exploration and exploitation of the moon , observation on the moon, basic scientific experiments and technical verification. ‘
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In other words, the base will be self-sufficient enough to operate without continuous supply from the earth. It will exist on the lunar surface, in orbit or both. And it will be a starting point for basic science, exploration and ‘utilization’ of the moon’s resources, as well as a proof of concept for the technologies needed to sustain human life. Earth.
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No country has ever landed a human crew on the moon, and they have not set a target date to start building the ILRS. However, Russia remains a leading aerospace country after the space race of the 20th century, and China has built increasingly impressive space stations and probes in recent years, as Live Science and sister site Space.com reported. During the years between the spacecraft’s retirement in 2011 and the first SpaceX launch in 2020, the two countries had the only vehicles in the world that could put people in orbit.
While CNSA said that the ILRS is open to any country that wants to get involved, and that the United States has been working with Russian astronauts in space since the 1970s, NASA does not work with China, as The Diplomat reports. The richest country in the world froze the world population from the International Space Station project in the 1980s and 1990s. Then, in 2011, Congress and President Barack Obama made it illegal for NASA to cooperate with any Chinese entity at all or for U.S. suppliers to sell satellite parts to the country.
As The Diplomat wrote, these moves did not stop China from building its own space stations. And now, as the International Space Station ages, it looks like the policy will not stop Russia, the US’s main partner in that project, from taking its talents to this cooperation. But if the lunar base is built and no rules change, the non-cooperation rule could prevent US astronauts from visiting the first permanent facility on the moon.
Originally published on Live Science.