Chinese officials have announced that there will be two phases to building a lunar base, and eventually a series of nodes will be created on the lunar surface and in orbit.
The original plan for the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a collaboration between China and Russia, was announced in June 2021. At the time, the two countries unveiled plans for a simple robotic base that would be built up gradually over five rocket launches of high tonnage between 2030 and 2035.
Now, China has unveiled more advanced plans for the ILRS at the International Conference on Deep Space Exploration in Anhui Province, reports .
How will the International Selenar Research Station work?
The first phase will be completed sometime around 2035, and an extended model will be built in 2050, according to Wu Yanhua, one of the coordinators of China’s deep space exploration project.
The expanded model will be “a comprehensive network of lunar stations using the station in lunar orbit as the central point and the south pole station as the main base, and this will include exploration nodes at the lunar equator and the far side of the Moon,” he said. Wu, according to state media.
Also, the International Selenary Research Station will be powered by solar, nuclear and radioisotope generators. Other infrastructure will be included, such as high-speed communications networks, lunar vehicles, and crewed pressurized and unpressurized rovers.
China has also attracted partners for these plans
Also interesting is that Wu revealed that the International Selenary Research Station will lay the groundwork for future .
All the while, China has also attracted partners for these plans. During the conference, Senegal became the 13th country to sign on to the project. On the other hand, NASA has its own plans, called Artemis, a parallel but separate program to return humans to the Moon. Both China and NASA want to send astronauts to the moon by the end of the current decade.
