The Politics of China Moon.

China lands on the Moon , it's a Message to
America.

Well it finally happened . This shows again how far China is .  There was vary little shock among American politicians in this age .  President Barack Obama is no longer shooting for the moon, with a budget plan that aborts a symbolic but expensive lunar program and spends $6 billion over five years to turn over space transportation to commercial companies.  I Am not happy about this, but remember we have 2 rovers on Mars doing science and not just taking pictures. Not to mention probes all over the solar system doing science.Over the weekend, China landed a rover on the Moon.  The mission is called Chang’e 3, and the rover is called Yutu, which means “Jade Rabbit”. It launched on Dec. 1, and orbited the Moon for about a week. On Dec. 14, the lander touched down near the edge of Mare Imbrium, and a few hours later deployed the rover. It’s been almost four decades since a state has made a soft landing on the moon (in a soft landing, the lander or rover alights intact on the ground). The last state to visit the lunar surface was the Soviet Union, in 1976. The US, the second country to make a soft moon landing, has not done so since 1972.As the Soviet Union was leaving the moon for the last time, China’s space program was just a fledgling one, limited to satellite and missile development. Its space exploration program was nonexistent It was not until 2004, following China’s successful launch of a manned Earth orbiter, that the state announced its long-term series of lunar missions, all to be titled “Chang’e.” Chang'e, in Chinese myth, was an archer’s wife who swallowed a magic elixir that lifted her to the moon. She took with her a pet rabbit, "Yu Tu,” or Jade Rabbit. There, the pair has stayed, a lunar goddess and her rabbit..   China becomes the third country to land a spacecraft on the moon in preparation for a manned visit. Meanwhile, U.S. astronauts have to ride Russian spacecraft to fix toilets on the International Space Station.Tourists visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where one of America's retired space shuttles now resides, were no doubt able to see news reports of the landing of China's first lunar vehicle, a solar-powered rover, on the surface of the moon. The truth is simple, the Chinese have been duplicating Russian ( American )  efforts in their Space Program. The Tiangong Tug and Shenzhou are duplicates of Salyut-3 and Soyuz. Change-3 and Yutu are duplicates of Luna-17 and Lunokhod-1. Both programs are dated from 1970. Yes there may be modern electronics and cameras aboard, but duplicates they are. Giving them more credit than that is a falsehood. If you count back to the year the Chinese began these efforts, they have barely kept up with the original Russian timeline 1957 - 1970.It may be tempting for Americans to think, “Been there, done that.” However, China is now envisioning the very same sort of ambitious megaprojects that the U.S. once dreamt of more than 50 years ago, when President John F. Kennedy urged America to “commit itself to achieving the goal … of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” For instance, China hopes to mine the moon for natural resources and to use it as a staging ground for further space exploration, although some believe the former goal is unrealistic because the cost is likely to exceed the value of the materials.  If you wondering why the American response was silent REMEMBER this , IT was President Obama that underfunded the American space program ( NASA) the original goal was "return" to the moon by 2020, if course the nation is  far behind in multi- stage capabilities . Russia and China now have the same technology we had to land a man on the moon back in the sixties , but more advanced since the Shuttle program went into retirement . It is ironic that the last manned mission to the moon, NASA's Apollo 17, left the lunar surface on the same day in 1972 as China's lunar lander arrived in 2013 — on Dec. 14. The last man to have walked on the moon, Eugene Cernan, told Fox News' Neil Cavuto something in 2011 that still holds true today: "We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do." Whether we return to the moon or not is problematical. But right now it seems that if we do, the Chinese might just be waiting there for us.