Satellite launch signals China’s ambition to join space powers

CHINA hopes to join an international space station project that already counts leading space powers like the United States and Russia as its members, a government official said yesterday.

China takes great pride in its expanding space programme and sees it as a way to validate its claims to be one of the world’s leading scientific nations. Yesterday, state-run newspapers said China will launch its first lunar probe later this month, just weeks after regional rival Japan successfully sent a lunar satellite into orbit.

But China does not participate in the International Space Station, due in part to American unease about allowing a communist dictatorship a place aboard.