TWO years ago, in December 2011, China published a blueprint outlining its ambitions in outer space. The launch, on December 2nd, of Chang’e-3—a lunar mission named after a Moon goddess—shows that it remains on track.

Things could still go wrong. In matters of space flight, landing is at least as perilous as taking off—and more so when that landing is on another body, rather than back on Earth. This will be China’s first attempt at such a landing. If it succeeds it will make the China National Space Administration (CNSA) only the second, after Russia’s, to put an unmanned rover on the Moon. It may also help pave the way for the agency to match NASA’s greater technical success of landing people there.

China has released only limited information about the mission. Its destination is believed to be Sinus Iridum, an area of the Moon free of loose boulders on the surface, and thus rover-friendly. 

The rover itself (named Yutu, meaning “Jade Rabbit”, after a pet that belonged to Chang’e) has six wheels and is intended to operate for three months. Reports of its weight have ranged from 100kg to 140kg. CNSA has not revealed the planned date of the landing attempt—though according to the European Space Agency, which is using its network of tracking stations to relay signals from and send commands to Chang’e-3 on behalf of CNSA, it is December 14th.

The probe took off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan. The launch, which was broadcast live on state television, was not without incident. The Xiaoxiang Morning Post reported the following day that nine minutes after lift-off rocket debris landed on two houses in a village more than 1,000km from Xichang, causing damage but no injuries.

Previous Chang’e missions, in 2007 and 2010, successfully orbited the Moon. The first was then deliberately crashed onto the lunar surface, while the second was launched out of lunar orbit and into orbit around the sun, the first Chinese-made object to be so dispatched to deep space.

It has been decades since the American and Soviet landings on the Moon. Chang’e-3 will be the first craft to arrive there since Luna-24, a Soviet mission, in 1976. Even so, critics doubt China will find much new of scientific value on the lunar surface, and suspect the mission has more to do with boosting the country’s prestige and preparing for the even greater prestige-boost of a manned lunar landing.

That cynicism has been enhanced by some overblown claims. CNSA is bragging, for example, that by placing an optical telescope on the Moon, Chang’e-3 will have achieved something “that so far hasn’t been done by other countries”. NASA’s Apollo 16 mission in 1972 did, however, deploy an ultraviolet telescope. Its crew recovered the film, but the now-inactive instrument remains on the Moon.

This does not mean that Chang’e-3, and Yutu in particular, have no scientific merit. The rover, for instance, sports a ground-penetrating radar for the study of rock and regolith (the crushed rock that passes for soil on the Moon). According to a report in Nature, this can scan as much as 100 metres below the surface. That may produce more interesting results thanYutu’s X-ray spectrometer, designed for regolith analysis, since many lunar samples retrieved by American and Soviet missions are already available for study on Earth.
According to CNSA’s blueprint, it too will bring Moon rocks back to Earth. The agency plans re-entry tests with an experimental craft by 2015. In 2020 Chang’e-5 will, if all goes well, return with samples.

That is not all CNSA has planned. In June it conducted its fifth manned mission, during which Shenzhou-10 docked with the first phase of the country’s putative space station. In 2015 it aims to launch Tiangong-2, the station’s second phase.

China’s first manned flight took place in 2003 when a single crewman, Yang Liwei, made 14 orbits. Its longest manned mission lasted 15 days, but officials say they are preparing astronauts for the rigours of “medium- and long-term space missions”.

Since the end of the Space Shuttle programme, NASA has been unable to launch manned missions of its own, and Americans are concerned about falling behind China. In a report issued in May, the country’s defence department worried publicly about China’s development of a “multidimensional programme to improve its capabilities to limit or prevent the use of space-based assets by adversaries during times of crisis or conflict”.

But America need not be too jittery. China is busy re-living the past for much the same reasons that America and the Soviet Union lived it the first time round. The future lies elsewhere. On December 3rd, also for the first time, a privately financed and built rocket put a private commercial satellite into orbit. The satellite was European. The rocket, from Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX, was American.