How the Philippines forced China to adjust historic mission to moon’s far side

Chinese space engineers made small but deliberate changes to last year’s historic sample retrieval mission to the far side of the moon to avoid political friction in the South China Sea, according to a new paper.

The Chang’e-6 spacecraft left the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island on board a Long March-5 rocket in May 2024, returning to Earth the following month with the world’s first lunar samples from the moon’s hidden side.

According to the paper published last month by China’s Journal of Astronautics, the Long March-5 flew southeast after lifting off and engineers delayed the release of the rocket’s nose cone by several dozen seconds, nudging the splashdown of debris further out to sea.

An accompanying map showed the original debris drop zone off the east coast of Luzon – the Philippines’ largest and most populous island – with the revised zone shifted further into the Philippine Sea to avoid waters considered by Manila to be under its jurisdiction.

“In response to new domestic regulations and evolving claims over foreign territorial sea baselines, we fine-tuned the launch trajectory timing,” Wang Qiong, the mission’s deputy chief designer, and his team wrote.

Without naming the Philippines, the authors said the delay pushed debris away from “sensitive maritime areas”.

South China Morning Post