The government of China now possesses something that no other humans have ever encountered — rocks and soil from the far side of the moon.
The successful return of the Chang’e-6 lunar mission with the historic cache on June 25 was a scientific coup that further solidified China’s place as one of the world’s top space powers, rivaled only by the United States.
And despite competition heating up in the global race to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, China’s space agency is again following the precedent set by NASA decades ago after the Apollo missions and sharing its lunar samples with scientists around the world.
“China welcomes scientists from all countries to apply (to study the samples) and share in the benefits,” said Liu Yunfeng, director of the international cooperation office of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), during a Thursday news conference in Beijing.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson he’s “pleased to hear CNSA intends to share” the materials collected by the Chang’e-6 lunar probe last month. The samples, gathered using a drill and a mechanical arm, include up to 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of lunar dust and rocks from an ancient crater on the moon’s far side, which is never visible to Earth.
“Make it available to the international community just as we will when we start bringing additional samples back, and as we did a half a century ago with the samples brought back from the six Apollo moon landings,” Nelson said.
It’s a rare moment of consensus for two space agencies competing to land astronauts on the moon and build a base near the lunar south pole. But US access to the samples may be stymied by a 2011 law known as the Wolf Amendment, which prohibits the use of government funds by NASA for bilateral cooperation with China or its agencies without authorization from Congress or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, effectively banning the space agency from routinely working with its Chinese counterpart.
“The root cause of obstacles to China-US space cooperation lies in US domestic laws, such as the Wolf Amendment, which hinder cooperation between the two countries in space exploration,” said Bian Zhigang, vice chair of the China National Space Administration, during the Thursday news conference. “If the US truly wishes to engage in normal space exchanges with China, I think they should take concrete measures to remove these obstacles.”