China Denies Moon Mining
China will not be launching a manned mission to the Moon in the foreseeable future, says Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China’s Moon exploration program. He wants to clarify earlier news reports in the Chinese media that said Beijing would be putting a man on the Moon by 2010 with the establishment of a Moonbase soon afterwards. “We will explore the Moon certainly,” says Ziyuan, “but with unmanned spacecraft. One of our goals is to bring lunar samples back to China for analysis. We are interested in the minerals on the Moon. We will prepare an unmanned spacecraft to do this.”
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