Special to CosmicTribune.com, September 11, 2024

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

China revealed how it plans to occupy the Moon, conduct asteroid defense of the Earth, and propagandized about its space program at the Sept. 4-6 second annual conference of China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL), or Tiandu Forum.

China’s Moon plans were briefed by Wu Yanhua, chief designer of the major Chinese deep space exploration project, who explained that the China-Russia International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) would consist of facilities on the Moon, in lunar orbit and on Earth.

The forum was held in Huangshan City, in Anhui Province and focused on the ILRS project joined by Russia, Venezuela, Belarus, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, South Africa, Egypt, Nicaragua, Thailand, Serbia and Kazakhstan.

These ILRS Moon facilities would be built two phases, Wu explained, according to a Sept. 5 report form China’s CGTN television:

“[A] basic model to be built by 2035 in the lunar south pole region, and an extended model to be built by about 2050…Per the blueprint, the extended model will be a comprehensive lunar station network that utilizes the lunar orbit station as its central hub and the south pole station as its primary base, and it will include exploration nodes on the lunar equator and the far side of the moon.”

Wu also revealed that, “the planned ILRS, which will be powered by solar, radioisotope and nuclear generators. It will also include lunar-Earth and high-speed lunar surface communication networks, as well as lunar vehicles like a hopper, an unmanned long-range vehicle, and pressurized and unpressurized manned rovers.”

Such an infrastructure on the Moon, according to Wu, would be an “expandable, maintainable system capable of long-term robotic operations with short-term human participation.”

While Chinese sources have often mentioned the possibility of China building a small space station for lunar orbit like the Gateway Space Station of the United States-led Artemis Program, Chinese sources have also suggested that a small space station would also be built at Earth-Moon Lagrangian Point-1 (EM-L1), which would facilitate constant contact with resupply missions to the ILRS Moon Bases.

According to the CGTN report, the Moon program’s future importance, according to Wu, “will be capable of laying a foundation for manned landings on Mars in the future…China is currently planning to land astronauts on the moon by 2030.”

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