China launches spacecraft to moon

Keep it. Keep it. Your question be on weapons. Be on your meal. You’re on your meal Kitty. Your question be on your meal. Be on your How is you lower? Well, that is just extraordinary to see. That is a lunar launch going to the dark side of the moon sent by China hoping to bring samples back down to Earth? Well, Nicole’s still with us. And as is our science correspondent Thomas Moore, Thomas just explained to us the aims of this mission. Yeah, we should call it the far side rather than dark side because it is lit by sunlight. It’s just we don’t see that side. And that’s really the ambition of the Chinese to be able to go round to the far side out of Direct Line of sight and still land robotic spacecraft, retrieve a sample and bring it back. And they hope to do that in 50-3 days. It is quite an extraordinary mission if they pull it off, because the the far side does hold some mysteries of the moon. It’s pockmarked, it’s much more mountainous, it’s rugged, unprotected by the Earth. So it has had bombardments from asteroids in the past. And that is one of the things that this mission could help solve by bringing back a sample to understand what materials have been brought back and try and age this old Apekin basin, perhaps the oldest in the solar system. And those mysteries could be revealed by this Chinese mission. Absolutely fascinating. And thanks for the correction on the far side of the moon. I better tell Pink Floyd as well. I never knew that, Thomas. So thank you for the information. Let’s go back to Nicole, shall we? It looked like a successful launch. It certainly did, as you said, extraordinary picture that we had there. And there has been a great deal of excitement in China about it. China’s in the middle of a long 5-6 day holiday at the moment. A lot of people travelled to that southern island of Hainan, and it’s quite a unique location. You can see the launch happening from the beach there. So people were lined up overnight. They had their tents trying to get a prime position so that they could watch the launch. Because this is more than just the space program. This is about national pride, it’s about power and it’s about prestige. For regular Chinese here, they are very proud of their space program. Most people that I’ve spoken to, a lot of people would have been tuning in to watch that picture there and that has sort of been the message that has been put forward by the government that this is something that the people of China should be proud of.