HELSINKI — Azerbaijan signed as much as China’s International Lunar Research Station project Tuesday, on the sidelines of a serious international space conference.
Li Guoping, chief engineer of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and Samaddin Asadov, chairman of the Board of Azercosmos, Azerbaijan’s space agency, signed a joint statement on cooperation on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) Oct. 3 through the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), hosted by Azerbaijan, within the capital Baku. CNSA announced the agreement Oct. 8 via a statement on its webpages.
The agreement, as with a press release released on South Africa joining the ILRS last month, doesn’t provide specifics of the cooperation.
The statement said the agreement will see CNSA and Azercosmos perform extensive cooperation within the demonstration, implementation, operation and application of the ILRS, in addition to training and other areas.
The ILRS project goals to construct a everlasting lunar base within the 2030s. The initiative is seen as a China-led, parallel project and potential competitor to the NASA-led Artemis Program.
China has now attracted around 15 signatories to its ILRS initiative, in line with representatives of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) under the CNSA. Nevertheless, an inventory of those partners isn’t yet available. The partners are known to consist of organizations and institutions in addition to countries.
Russia, Venezuela and South Africa have signed up. The Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), Swiss firm nanoSPACE AG, the Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), and the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT) have also signed joint statements. Pakistan can also be thought to have signed up.
China and Russia presented a joint ILRS roadmap in 2021 in St. Petersburg. Beijing has nonetheless since apparently taken the role of lead of the project since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
China is establishing a corporation, named ILRSCO, in town of Hefei in Anhui province to coordinate the initiative. DSEL said earlier this 12 months that China goals to finish the signing of agreements with space agencies and organizations for founding members of ILRSCO by October.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is growing the variety of signatories to its Artemis Accords. Last month Germany became the twenty ninth country to enroll to the Accords, the political underpinning of the Artemis lunar program.
The Accords have signatories from each continent. A working group from the Accords stated at IAC that it drafted ideas to spice up transparency in lunar cooperation.
China is already working on a series of robotic missions to launch later this decade as precursors to the ILRS. The 2026 Chang’e-7 lunar south pole mission and 2028 Chang’e-8 in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission will lay the premise for the larger plan, in line with CNSA. NARIT shall be involved in Chang’e-7 through the Sino-Thai Sensor Package for Space Weather Global Monitoring payload.
China will next 12 months also launch Chang’e-6, which shall be a first-ever lunar far side sample return mission. Pakistan shall be involved in a CubeSat to fly with the mission.
A relay satellite named Queqiao-2 shall be launched ahead of that mission early in 2024. The Queqiao-2 satellite will provide communications support for the Chang’e-6, 7 and eight missions.
Russia’s Luna 25 mission was nominally a part of the ILRS. That mission launched in August this 12 months, but crashed into the moon during an anomalous orbital maneuver.
Azercosmos was founded in 2010. It operates a pair of telecommunications satellites, while communication with its only distant sensing satellite, Azersky, launched in 2014, was lost in April this 12 months. Chinese business telemetry, tracking and command firm Emposat operates two ground stations in Azerbaijan.