The reason why China is aggressively deploying the Moon exploration program

According to a recent diplomatic network, the Chang'e 5-T1 probe (Chinese Hang Nga 5-T1) (also known as Xiaofei), completed an orbit around the Moon in October 2014. . This is the first time a lunar flight has been made since the US and Russia conducted such flights in the 1970s.

Xiaofei is Hang Nga 5's forerunner, a type of probe that is expected to bring back earths (regoliths) mined 2 meters above the Moon, believed to contain three-quarter helium. price for energy production.

Xiaofei's main goal in the aforementioned expedition was to test the atmosphere re-infiltration ability on a compartment like the one designed for Hang Nga 5, expected to be launched in 2017. Like a probe Yutu, the destination of Hang Nga 5 on the Moon will be Mare Imbrium, also known as "Sea of ​​Rain" , one of the vast seas formed from the crater on the Moon, visible from the Earth, and is considered to be a place that accumulates many helium-3.

China takes the probe to the Moon.(Source: AFP)

This special resource is pushing China to take the lead in the secret space race between the great powers to capture helium-3, the most energetic gas known to man and more important, for making fourth-generation nuclear weapons.

According to Dr. Abdul Kalam, former Indian President and leading scientist of the country, "The Moon helium-3 treen source can provide a source of energy more than 10 times the energy from all. fossil fuels on Earth ".

In particular, a ton of helium-3 can produce enough electricity to meet 80% of Tokyo's needs within a year. A ton of helium-3 is also capable of producing 1.5 times more energy than the Tsar Bomba - the most powerful nuclear bomb ever, with a destructive power of up to 58 megatons. Soviet experimented in 1962. Tsar Bomba had a destructive power about 1,350 times the total number of atomic bombs that destroyed Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki cities.

In recent years, international scientists have begun to talk more about the value of helium-3 in energy production through fusion synthesis, and many countries around the world are quietly deploying plans. planning to exploit this resource from the Moon. The Earth has only about 100kg of helium-3 that exists in nature and about 600kg as a by-product in the process of disintegrating tritium-based nuclear warheads from the US and Russia.

Helium-3 is the most valuable and valuable resource on the Moon, besides titanium, nickel, platinum, aluminum, silicon, uranium, thorium, phosphorous, diamonds, water, and rare earth elements. In recent years, the US, China, Japan and India have mapped and urgently analyzed these resources.

China is very close to a breakthrough in energy production technology from helium-3, and it is aiming to exploit helium-3 on the Moon as a strategic priority.

Helium-3 is a valuable fuel source, because it produces extremely high heat through fusion fusion that produces virtually no toxic radioactive neutrons. Thus, fourth-generation nuclear weapons using pure helium-3 will produce little or no radioactive dust, which can be considered to be superior and avoidable conventional weapons. There are prohibitions in nuclear weapons treaties. Military observers argue that the country that controls the helium-3 source on the Moon will become the world's new hegemony.

The potential of helium-3 on the Moon is causing a new race between cosmic powers to assert the territory and sovereignty over the Earth's satellite resources. Currently, some politicians have called for building a legal basis for sharing resources on the Moon, which the 1967 Convention on Aerospace stipulates as "common property of all humanity." ".