HELSINKI — China’s space agency has accepted the participation of a commercial space company in a lunar exploration mission for the first time in a move which may foreshadow greater commercial lunar activity.
STAR.VISION Aerospace Group Limited, engaged in areas including satellite design, intelligent satellite platforms and AI data analysis, will team up with Zhejiang University (ZJU) and the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Türkiye to develop two, 5-kilogram lunar surface micro-exploration robots. The project has been selected for China’s Chang’e-8 mission which is scheduled for launch in 2028 on a Long March 5 rocket.
STAR.VISION is the first Chinese private enterprise approved by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) to participate in the lunar exploration program, STAR.VISION said in a Jan. 24 statement.
The three parties will cooperate while focusing on specific areas. ZJU, which has earlier provided an imager for the Queqiao lunar relay satellite which supported the Chang’e-4 lunar far side mission, will focus on the engineering aspects. STAR.VISION is expected to provide algorithms and components.
METU’s participation follows Türkiye’s application last year to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) and highlights how China’s international engagement on the project is playing out. “It is a great honor to participate in such a cutting-edge international cooperation project,” Halil Ersin Soken, the project’s chief designer for the Turkish side and professor at METU, told Chinese media. “We will focus on the development of navigation systems and robotic subsystems,” he added.
Chang’e-8 is a test in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) mission targeting the lunar south pole, with a view to long-term lunar habitation. ISRU refers to using local resources, like lunar soil, to produce materials or consumables to support lunar habitation. Chang’e-8, and the 2026 Chang’e-7 mission, will serve as a basis for China’s future, larger-scale ILRS project to be constructed in the 2030s.
Expanding commercial space in China
The move to include STAR.VISION signals that Chinese companies are able to participate in national-level lunar missions, but also raises the possibility that the country could follow the lead of other nations and allow commercial entities to attempt their own lunar missions.
China has gradually increased the space in which commercial actors and private capital can engage in the space sector, allowing gradually larger capacity rockets and huge constellation plans, and last year made commercial space a key priority. Commercial lunar missions, potentially launching on Chinese commercial rockets, could be a future development. China is already emulating NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) as it last year selected two proposals to develop spacecraft for low-cost space station resupply missions which will launch on commercial rockets.
Meanwhile, separate American and Japanese commercial lunar landers are currently in Earth orbit in the early stages of circuitous journeys to the moon. The pair launched on a Falcon 9 rocket Jan. 15.
Mobile charging robot from Hong Kong
The Chang’e-8 mission will feature another robot through an international cooperation project. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) will lead the project, involving a number of Chinese universities, the state-owned Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), and the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), an ILRS partner.
The roughly 100-kilogram robot will conduct scientific exploration, instrument deployment and installation tasks on the lunar surface. “Its mobile wireless charging capability can power up various devices on the lunar surface, boosting the efficiency of both lunar exploration and collaborative operations,” according to a HKUST statement.
International cooperation, lunar challenges
CNSA issued an announcement of opportunities for international cooperation in the Chang’e-8 mission in October 2023, making around 200 kilograms of payload mass available. It follows similar Chinese international engagement with earlier Chang’e lunar missions.
Last year’s Chang’e-6 lunar far side sample return mission included payloads from France, Sweden and Italy, and a Pakistani cubesat.
China recently took other steps related to lunar habits and ISRU. One of the experiments aboard the Tianzhou-8 cargo spacecraft launched in November is a set of bricks made from varying compositions of lunar regolith simulant. The bricks were to be deployed on external racks outside Tiangong and exposed to the harsh vacuum and radiation and temperature environments of outer space for around three years. These will then be returned to Earth for analysis and could inform how the ILRS could be constructed.The country is also looking at solutions to a range of lunar exploration challenges, from exploring the use of lava tubes as habitats, powering surface spacecraft in shadowed areas or lunar nighttime via lasers from orbit, and establishing a communications, navigation and remote sensing network to support lunar exploration.