China's lunar robotic rover was dismissed as a tragic "me too" exercise by a country lagging decades behind the world's leading space powers.
This common reaction missed the point. Jade Rabbit's successful launch, landing and exploration is evidence of China's meteoric rise in the space stakes, and one that will only accelerate. "It is a classic example of the tortoise and the hare," says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington DC.
To get an idea of China's burgeoning space programme, look no further than its satellites. Starting in 1970, China launched low-quality transponders and rudimentary spy satellites capable of only the most basic tasks at an entirely unimpressive rate of one per year. By 2012, the country had surpassed the US with 19 launches in a single year. China had also sent its first taikonaut into space, conducted its first space walk and completed its first rendezvous and docking with a small space laboratory. "The manned program they are building is progressing a lot faster than the US did with theirs in the sixties," says Richard Holdaway, Director of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space division, one of the UK's closest collaborators on the Chinese space programme. "They are catching up at an astonishing rate."
"In 15 years they have gone from bit player to leading player," says Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they have done so on a shoestring. China's space budget is less than one-tenth of the US one, according to a recent estimate by the Space Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Colorado Springs.
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This common reaction missed the point. Jade Rabbit's successful launch, landing and exploration is evidence of China's meteoric rise in the space stakes, and one that will only accelerate. "It is a classic example of the tortoise and the hare," says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington DC.
To get an idea of China's burgeoning space programme, look no further than its satellites. Starting in 1970, China launched low-quality transponders and rudimentary spy satellites capable of only the most basic tasks at an entirely unimpressive rate of one per year. By 2012, the country had surpassed the US with 19 launches in a single year. China had also sent its first taikonaut into space, conducted its first space walk and completed its first rendezvous and docking with a small space laboratory. "The manned program they are building is progressing a lot faster than the US did with theirs in the sixties," says Richard Holdaway, Director of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space division, one of the UK's closest collaborators on the Chinese space programme. "They are catching up at an astonishing rate."
"In 15 years they have gone from bit player to leading player," says Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they have done so on a shoestring. China's space budget is less than one-tenth of the US one, according to a recent estimate by the Space Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Colorado Springs.
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