Venezuela partners with China to build first scientific base on the Moon
Venezuela is the first nation in the Americas to join the ambitious megaproject led by China and Russia to build a permanent base near the South Pole of the Moon within the next decade.
The official name is the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a joint initiative of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) and the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
However, the war in Ukraine is the focus of the vast majority of Moscow's technological investments, which has allowed Beijing to take the lead in the ILRS. Under these conditions, Venezuela's Vice President and Minister of Science and Technology, Gabriela Jiménez, and the administrator and head of the CNSA, Professor Zhang Kejian, signed an agreement on 17 July via videoconference formalising the accession of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), created in October 2007 and in operation since January 2008.
The Chinese institution taking over the leadership of ILRS for the time being is the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory or DSEL, which is also in talks with the Malaysian and Pakistani space agencies with a view to formalising their participation.
The head of DSEL, Wu Yanhua, has announced that he is in the process of setting up an organisation that will "manage, distribute, coordinate and supervise the work of the robotic lunar base". The Sino-Russian aim is for the ILRS to be completed by 2035. It plans to test technologies for the descent and return of lunar rock samples to Earth by 2030. And between 2031 and 2035 to deploy communications, power generation and research systems.
Nicolás Maduro's contribution
The main contribution of the Venezuelan space agency headed by Marglad Bencomo since September 2019 is its ground-based space infrastructure. President Hugo Chávez acquired his first communications satellite from Beijing in November 2005 -VeneSat-1, christened Simón Bolívar-, which was built in China and launched from China on 29 October and December 2008.
The contract included the construction in Venezuela of two ground facilities equipped with large parabolic antennas to monitor and control the satellite. One is located in the centre of the country, at the Captain Manuel Ríos aerospace base (Guárico state), 200 kilometres from Caracas.
The second, which serves as a backup station for the first, is located at the so-called Manikuyá military fort in the state of Bolívar, some 515 kilometres southeast of the national capital. It is likely that the CNSA has agreed to build new, large satellite dishes to reinforce the monitoring of its future lunar, Martian and other planetary missions.
With greater political and economic clout and influence than Moscow in the Caribbean nation, the Beijing authorities have been courting the Caracas government for more than a year to gain entry into the mega-project to build the first scientific base on the Moon.
An official delegation of senior Beijing space officials landed in Caracas in mid-April to renew the content of the bilateral framework agreement on science, technology and research, as well as to extend a line of scholarships to train Venezuelan engineers and technicians in Chinese universities and space institutions.
The counterparts Maduro is relying on
The commission of Chinese space authorities was led by Xu Hongliang, the secretary general of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), the country's space agency. He was accompanied by the presidents of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), Wu Yansheng, the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), Li Daming, and the China Great Wall Industrial Corporation (CGWIC), Hu Zhongmin.
CASC is the major state-owned prime contractor for China's space programme; CAST is involved in the design, development and manufacture of launchers, space capsules and satellites of all kinds, while CGWIC is responsible for marketing CAST's products and services on a global scale.
What is the counterpart that Nicolás Maduro's government will receive? The Caracas government is probably finalising the purchase or has already secretly contracted a second government communications satellite, VeneSat-2 Guaicaipuro, to provide the telephone, television and Internet services that VeneSat-1 has ceased to provide.
Manufactured by CAST, VeneSat-1 was lost in March 2020 due to a technical failure in orbit, so there is an urgent need to get VeneSat-2 into space as soon as possible. Negotiations for a second communications platform date back to President Maduro's visit to China in September 2018. However, Venezuela may have slowed down the purchase and opted to contract the services of commercial satellites Apstar or ChinaSat from state-owned China Satellite Communications.
The ILRS roadmap was presented to the public on 16 June 2021 in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the Global Space Exploration Conference organised by the International Astronautical Federation. The scientific objectives of the project, its different phases and its launch schedule were presented.
The starting signal for the ILRS will be given by the Russian space probe Luna-25, which is scheduled to take off next August on a date not yet announced. The 1.8-tonne Luna-25 should land near the South Pole and restart several scientific missions that ended in failure. The Kremlin has not successfully landed a spacecraft on the Earth's natural satellite since the successful landing of Luna-24 on 22 August 1976, no less than 47 years ago.