Beijing and Moscow agree on a lunar colony as Washington delays its Martian helicopter flight

While Russia and China agree on the final details of the construction of a joint lunar base, the attention of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is focused on the first flight of the small unmanned helicopter Ingenuity in the airspace of Mars, which has suffered a serious setback that has prevented its inaugural liftoff scheduled for 11 April.

In pre-flight tests, engineers at JPL's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) responsible for Ingenuity identified a major anomaly in the software that is supposed to control the aircraft's autonomous flight. While tests of the rotor spin that moves the blades at low speeds were positive, this was not the case at higher revolutions, at 2,400 revolutions per minute.

Solving the problem not only requires modifying the faulty algorithms and reinstalling the new software on board Ingenuity. It also requires the changes to be thoroughly checked, reviewed and tested on the ground before being loaded on board the helicopter.

Once validated, a telecommand will relay the new software to the Martian rover Perseverance, which in turn will relay it to Ingenuity for uploading. The transmission will be made via one of the large antennas of NASA's three Deep Space stations - one of which is Robledo de Chavela, near Madrid. Once the programme is installed on board, the high-speed test will be carried out again. If the result is satisfactory, a date will be assigned for the long-awaited inaugural liftoff.

All the operations described above are being carried out against the clock. The primary mission of Persevance is to search for traces of past life on Mars. Ingenuity's five planned flights, on the other hand, are part of a technology demonstration programme, resulting in the suspension of the rover's activities, whose cameras and sensors must be fully dedicated to observing the flights. Consequently, if the maximum deadline of thirty days is reached and the five flights have not been completed, the helicopter tests will be suspended and the rover will return to its scientific activity.

While the political authorities in the United States watch as NASA technicians in California try to solve the problems of a device like Ingenuity, which is several hundred million kilometres from Earth, the leaders of China and Russia have committed to building a joint colony on the surface or around the Moon, just over 384,000 kilometres away.

The agreement has been endorsed by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The latter endorsed the importance of the Sino-Russian initiative during a teleconference with top Russian space leaders on the occasion of 12 April, a historic date which this year commemorated the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, the first human being to orbit the Earth. 

The head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), Zhang Kejian, and the head of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), Dimitri Rogozin, signed the alliance. The aim is to build near the South Pole an "autonomous and permanent experimental base for scientific research" on or around our natural satellite in order to carry out "multidisciplinary activities and long-term autonomous operations".

Named the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), this is a major initiative in space cooperation between Beijing and Moscow that places the two countries on an equal footing and opens the door to a new era of strategic collaboration. According to the signatories, the agreement aims to strengthen scientific research exchanges, promote exploration and the peaceful use of space.

For Russia, it is a step that recognises the technological capabilities and economic potential of its Asian neighbour, both in the development of launchers and of satellites, capsules and space infrastructure. From China's point of view, it means taking advantage of Russia's 60 years of manned spaceflight experience.

In his message to senior officials and leaders of the national space community, Putin stressed that Russia "must maintain" its status as a "leading nuclear and space power" in the 21st century. The space industry is "directly related to defence and I would like to remind you of this," he said. 

Drawing on the document entitled Basic Principles of the State Policy on Space Activities until 2030 approved in January 2020, Putin wants to examine the long-term priorities of space exploration and strengthen the sector as a whole. One of them is the construction of a lunar base from 2025 and 15 years later a manned exploration system. But now it wants these and other major projects, their goals and the achievements assigned to each phase, as well as linking them to annual funding sources.

In particular, the moon is no longer seen as an uninteresting rock swarming around the Earth. The years of landing on the moon for a few days, demonstrating the technological potential of its visitors and returning to the Blue Planet are now a thing of the past. The major world and regional powers look to the Moon as a potential source of resources, from which metals and rare earths such as platinum, titanium, scandium and yttrium, key to the future, can be extracted.

The Russian-Chinese lunar project is the reaction of presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to the Artemis programme promoted by Donald Trump and taken up by his successor, Joe Biden. Artemis is a NASA initiative that seeks to return astronauts to the moon, including a woman, to explore the lunar surface more intensively and study the possibilities for extracting its resources.

If the American initiative has been associated to a greater or lesser extent with the space agencies of Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United Emirates, the United Kingdom and the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russian-Chinese project will be no less and is also "open to the participation of third countries and international partners".