00:00Dr. David Whitehouse is an astronomer and space writer. He's been talking to Li Jianhua.
00:06China has a very impressive and forward-looking space program.
00:12Surely, looking back over its history, one thing that comes out is how focused on development the space program was.
00:20It had specific goals to achieve the first satellite, the first astronaut in space, the first communication satellites.
00:30And it carried it out methodically and very efficiently indeed.
00:35So although its launch rate was, until fairly recently, much less than rockets launched in the West,
00:42it did so with more purpose and with more achievement on each launch.
00:47So we can look back to the first launches, the first satellite, indeed the first cosmonaut,
00:52and recently the first space station it had, knowing that they were very well achieved.
00:58They are impressive, well-regarded globally, and obviously part of a long-term program,
01:05which it is executing very well indeed and is causing much interest and much comment
01:12with other space nations and other space programs around the world.
01:17And China always has these long-term, media-term plans, including for its space exploration programs.
01:24How has China Space Day evolved from your perspective, from your understanding,
01:29from a domestic milestone into something with more international visibility now?
01:33Well, when I first started reporting on China and talking to Chinese space scientists,
01:39it was, I can say, quite difficult to get information from them.
01:44What we obtained was very broad, very rough details, which weren't actually much more than we knew already.
01:54So it was very much a game of conjecture and analysis and reading between the lines,
02:00because I spoke to many space scientists and indeed space politicians in China
02:05who were obviously not able to explain exactly what their long-term goal was,
02:10even though we both understood what that means.
02:12Nowadays, it is much more easier access, it is much more interesting.
02:18There are far more people in China involved in space,
02:21not only with the state-sponsored space effort, but with private individual companies.
02:27They are doing far more things, from exploration, exploration of the moon and onto Mars,
02:36communications, Earth observations, tracking, navigation.
02:40They are doing far more things, far more open about it.
02:43And nowadays, you can do what you couldn't do 20 years ago,
02:47is you go to an exhibition and actually talk to the engineers and the scientists involved
02:52in building their space future, because they understand perhaps more than even the Americans have until recently,
03:00that there is a future space ecology that is vital for business, industry and progress on Earth.
03:07I'm pretty sure that you are watching this today,
03:10because there are some new findings from Chang'e 5 samples,
03:14including the discovery of two new lunar materials.
03:17So what can that tell us about the formation of the moon?
03:22Well, China really has kick-started many aspects of lunar exploration
03:29by being able to return samples from the moon.
03:33Also, being able to land on the far side of the moon,
03:36which is something nobody has ever done before.
03:38So they really have had an impressive series of achievements
03:42in unmanned exploration of the moon,
03:45and returning samples from the moon for the first time since the Soviet Union did it in the 1970s.
03:52It's a part of the moon that geologists really look to for having the deposits to,
03:58if we could study them, to analyse the history of the surface bombardment of the moon
04:03and the history of the development of the moon's interior.
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