The Tiangong-3 station, as presently configured

Generally China’s state-run news agency Xinhua posts no more than one to two short space-related articles per day, with most confined to simply announcing the launch of a rocket.

Today however that state-run agency posted a dozen short articles, linked it appeared to the two press conferences held in connection with tomorrow’s launch of a new crew to China’s Tiangong-3 space station.

• China to launch Shenzhou-21 crewed spaceship on Oct. 31
• Astronauts of China’s Shenzhou-21 mission meet press
• China discloses new space mission tasks, highlighting mice experiment
• New extravehicular spacesuits offer astronauts greater comfort, convenience: official
• Hong Kong, Macao astronauts in good health after completing rigorous training
• Pakistani astronaut to enter Chinese space station as payload specialist
• China targets manned moon landing by 2030, outlines testing tasks ahead

The list above is not complete, leaving out a few other short propaganda pieces. Some of these stories — such as those directly related to that new crew launch tomorrow — could have easily been folded into one report. They were not, however, in order to create a large number of separate reports, which in turn hides the fact that there is only one news outlet reporting anything from those two press conferences.

Out of this plethora of stories, two news items stand out however. One, China has now agreed to fly a Pakistani to Tiangong-3. Negotiations for that mission began in 2018. Training has now finally begun. China is also moving forward on flying astronauts from Hong Kong and Macao, two places formally run by western powers that China now controls, quite oppressively. Like the Soviet Union, it is using its space program for propaganda stunts to distract those regions from its iron rule.

Second and more important, Chinese officials claim their program to do a manned lunar landing is still on schedule for a 2030 launch.

A series of crucial upcoming tests include — integrated testing for the Lanyue lunar lander, thermal tests and maximum dynamic pressure escape tests for the Mengzhou manned spacecraft, and low-altitude and technology verification flights for the Long March-10 carrier rocket, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said on Thursday.

CMSA spokesperson Zhang Jingbo announced at a press conference that the Mengzhou-1 spacecraft mission will be included in the public logo solicitation campaign alongside missions to China’s space station. This spacecraft is primarily designed for lunar missions while also supporting the space station missions in low-Earth orbit.

All development and construction work for the crewed lunar mission is proceeding as planned, said Zhang. Primary preliminary prototyping of key flight hardware, including the Long March-10 rocket, the Mengzhou spacecraft, the Lanyue lander, the Wangyu lunar extravehicular suit and the Tansuo crewed lunar rover, has been completed.

Zhang also admitted that the workload remains heavy, with lots of “new technologies still requir[ing] validation,” but he and “the project team has pledged to overcome these hurdles.”

China’s lunar program, as proclaimed in 2021

What the report fails to mention is that this Apollo-like mission will do nothing to establish China’s proposed lunar base, dubbed the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). In fact, these news pieces all act to hide the fact that the base will not be established in 2030, as China had predicted in 2021 and shown to the right. In fact, it will be nowhere near a “comprehensible establishment of ILRS” by 2030.

China is clearly making progress in its lunar program, but it is clearly not the immediate threat to American interests on the Moon that so many American politicians claim. It will land men on the Moon, but only in a manner comparable to Apollo. It will also establish a small unmanned science outpost on the surface, but this will not be an actual manned lunar base for at least one to two decades, at the very earliest.

To beat China in space the very last thing we should be doing is copying them with another Apollo-like stunt, as presently planned by NASA with its Artemis program. Instead, the U.S. government should dump that failed Apollo approach (which the Chinese themselves are copying), and do whatever it can to help develop a competitive, commercial space industry in Earth orbit, as quickly as possible.

It will be that commercial space industry that will colonize the Moon and Mars, because that industry will not only develop the wide range of capabilities needed for such colonization, it will do it while making a profit. And profits and capitalism and most importantly freedom will fuel that exploration far better than any government “space program.”

To do this however our American politicians will have to start acting like servants of the American people, not their lords. And sadly they haven’t had to do this for many years.