Following the meeting of China’s top Communist leaders last week in Beijing, China has switched gears from its national agenda to its galactic agenda. The Chang’e I, the nation’s first lunar probe blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province at 6:05pm Wednesday and separated from its rocket 24 minutes later. And a half an hour after that, the director of the Xichang center declared the launch a success. The probe will orbit the moon for the next year and send satellite images to China’s space program in preparation for a space vehicle landing in 2012 and a manned mission in 2020. While congrats to China on launching its first orbiter — there’s no reason the U.S. and Russia should be the only ones there — there are few funny elements to this story. And it’s not the word “probe.” It’s the fact the Chinese government came out last week and said that there would be a branch of the Communist Party in space. The laws of the party stipulate that a chapter can be established anywhere there are 3 or more card-carrying members of the party. And while this lunar orbiter is unmanned, the 2020 lunar mission and a manned mission next year will have the requisite numbers of card-carrying Communist astronauts to bring a CPC chapter into space. The second funny thing about the Chinese space program is that Beijing felt the need to calm fears within the international community that these space missions had military objectives. Even with an unmanned moon probe, the world still doesn’t trust China. Perhaps because earlier this year, China blasted one of its weather satellites to bits with a ballistic missile. The China Daily quoted a National Defense official as saying, “Chang’e I is purely a scientific mission; it has no military aim and is carrying no military facilities or equipment.” Phew. In 2003, China became just the third nation, after the U.S. and Russia, to send a man into space.
•China Daily: One Step Closer to the Moon
•Photo: China Daily