Why You Should Be Happy About China ’s Historic Moon Landing

There is a perfectly wonderful map on a playful Facebook cartography page. It shows all of the countries in the world, with a two-color key underneath. Red indicates “countries with moon on the flag.” There are thirteen of them. Blue indicates “countries with flag on the moon.” There is only one: the United States. It’s hard not to get a patriotic thrill from that—even if it was never technically true. The U.S. is certainly the first—and so far the only—country whose flags on the moon were planted by human hands. But the Soviet Union was the first to get its emblem onto the lunar surface at all, when the Lunik 2 impactor crashed on the moon in 1959, carrying a coin emblazoned with the Soviet flag. It took the U.S. until 1964 to duplicate that feat, and then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev could not resist tweaking the behind-the-curve Americans as they struggled to catch up. “The Soviet pennant on the moon has been awaiting an American pennant for a long time,” he said to much laughter. “It is starting to become lonesome.” Ultimately, the Soviet pennant had plenty of company—more than it may have wanted. Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. managed to soft-land spacecraft on the moon, but the U.S. bested that with its astronauts. In 2008, India joined the metal-on-the-moon club, sending an impactor to the surface from its Chandrayaan-1 orbiter. China followed in 2013 with its soft-landed Chang’...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized China onetime space Source Type: news