Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, claimed that most people are unaware of how far along China’s space program is.
Mr. Musk was responding to Chris Hadfield’s tweet, a former Canadian Space Agency astronaut who cited a news article to claim that China will be able to land on the moon by 2030.
China Space Program Surprises Elon Musk
The primary architect of the nation’s lunar exploration program, Wu Weiren, was quoted in the story as claiming that meeting the 2030 deadline is not an issue in the official Chinese journal CGTN.
After declaring during a press conference that China’s space officials had initiated the manned lunar program and intend to send humans to the moon before 2030, Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency, made the statement in his tweet.
Reuters reports that Mr. Musk arrived in Beijing on his own plane on Tuesday morning.
According to the news agency, Mr. Musk will also visit Tesla’s Shanghai facility and meet with top Chinese authorities while in China.
But Tesla hasn’t said anything about whether its CEO has landed in China.
Yet according to ADS-B Exchange, a flight aggregation website, Mr. Musk’s private aircraft, a 2015 Gulfstream G650ER, was visible taking off from Alaska on Tuesday morning, Asia time, before flying across Japan and South Korea.
Astronauts to Reach Moon Before 2030
Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency, China now intends to send astronauts to the moon by 2030.
The four astronauts that will go on the Artemis II mission were announced by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency last month: Jeremy Hansen, Christina Hammock Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman.
Since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the four selected astronauts will be the first people to go the farthest from Earth’s low earth orbit while traveling around the moon in the Orion Spacecraft.
The second of the two test flights slated for November 2024 before the United States returns to the lunar surface is called Artemis II.
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