China’s lofty plans to send a man into space are causing a stir in the United States that could, eventually, launch another international space race. ‘Within 50 years, China will be No. 1,’ an academic told GEOFFREY YORK. All it has to do is keep the money coming and figure out the technology. Zhang Yibao, a 20-year-old university sophomore in baggy shorts and oversize basketball shoes, clicks a few commands on his computer. A pirated copy of a U.S. space robot grinds into motion, crawling across an imitation of the surface of Mars. “The battery is running out, so we’re only doing simple things,” he apologizes. Never underestimate Chinese ingenuity. When an aerospace university in Beijing decided to build a knock-off of the U.S. robot that had explored Mars, it knew that it could not hope for access to the space secrets of its American rivals. So its students simply went onto the Internet and borrowed the design from an old photograph.
June 15th, 2002
Space, Maple Leaf’s final frontier … The Globe and Mail
No Canadians ever got to walk on the moon, but this country’s space officials are looking even farther away and hoping to see the Maple Leaf on the Red Planet. The Canadian Space Agency signed on yesterday to a bold interplanetary project that could lead to human travel to Mars. The CSA agreed to participate in the European Space Agency’s most visionary undertaking to date, Aurora, which has been described as Europe’s equivalent of the Apollo lunar program. Aurora will define Europe’s long-term plans for the exploration of the solar system, including the possibility of humans journeying beyond Earth orbit, either to the moon, Mars or asteroids.