Watch: CHINA lands on the f**king MOON.
As I’ve intimated in other places – I don’t care what nation of humanity explores space, or for what reasons. I’m lumping us all together and considering it a win for us barely not-primates. This weekend China landed on the fucking moon. So I’m high-fiving for all of us.
Hit the jump to check it out.
This is the first soft landing on the Moon in nearly 40 years, and was undertaken to test out technology and perform some science experiments from the lunar surface. I’ll defer to my friend Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society blog for details on all this (including earlier posts about the mission itself).
My thoughts haven’t changed since I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. I’m glad humans are sending things to the Moon — read what Sean Carroll wrote about that — but I’d like to see the United States taking this sort of thing more seriously. When the US dreams big, it can make grand things happen. We’re becoming more insular in our outlook on a lot of things, including space exploration, and that’s a damn shame.
We can reach for the stars is we want to. We just have to choose to do so.