China Just Launched a Rocket From the Moon
Chang'e 5's ascent vehicle lifted off from the lunar surface with soil samples aboard, a first for China's space program.
Yesterday, China pulled off something no one had done in 44 years: it launched a rocket off the surface of the Moon. The ascent vehicle of the Chang’e 5 mission lifted off on December 3, carrying with it a haul of lunar soil and rock collected over the previous couple of days, and it’s now flying solo in lunar orbit while the rest of the mission waits to catch it.
It’s worth pausing on how many things had to go right for this to happen. Landing on the Moon is hard. Digging up samples with a drill and a robotic arm, on a body with essentially no atmosphere and a light-speed delay for every command, is harder. But launching from the Moon is its own category of difficult — there’s no launch pad, no ground crew doing final checks, no do-overs. The ascent vehicle had to ignite its engine, fly a precise trajectory off an uneven lunar surface, and reach orbital velocity using nothing but what it carried down with it.
What happens next
The ascender isn’t headed to Earth directly. It’s now on course to rendezvous and dock with the orbiter/returner combination that’s been waiting in lunar orbit since the mission launched in late November. That docking is expected around December 6, and if it goes to plan, the samples get transferred into the return capsule for the trip home. It’s a maneuver China has never attempted before — automated docking in lunar orbit is a very different beast than docking in low Earth orbit, where you’ve got things like GPS and a lot more institutional experience to lean on.
If everything holds together, this would be the first time material has been carried off the Moon and brought back to Earth since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976. NASA’s Apollo astronauts obviously brought samples back too, but nobody has managed a robotic round trip since the ’70s. The US, Soviet Union, and now China are the only three to have landed anything intact on the Moon’s surface at all, and China would be the first newcomer to the sample-return club in nearly half a century.
I’ll admit I wasn’t tracking this mission that closely until the landing pictures started circulating a few days ago, but the ascent is the part that actually makes me nervous watching from the outside. Everything before this was optional in some sense — you could lose the lander and still call the mission survivable, gather what science you could from orbit. Once you’re relying on a single engine burn off an unprepared surface with sample containers strapped to the top, there’s no plan B if it doesn’t light. So far it has. Docking is next, and if that works too, we’re looking at fresh lunar rock in Chinese labs before the year is out.