PRC to Broadcast Folk Tunes from Moon, Raises Concerns
Chinese news service, Xinhua, reports that government officials in the PRC have announced what songs will be broadcast back to earth from the country’s first lunar-probing during next year’s Mid-Autumn Festival. According to the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National
Defense, the organization in charge of the lunar project:
"Most of the songs [will be] Chinese folk songs. The song [that] got [the] most votes was [the] folk song ‘My Wonderful Home Town’, followed by ‘I Love China’, ‘Singing Praises of Motherland’ and 27 others."
In other Chinese space-related news, the U.S.A. Today reported yesterday that U.S. defense officials are concerned tests China has been conducting of ground-based laser devices capable of jamming U.S. spy satellites over their country. Given the amount of money the U.S. has poured into developing satellites for intelligence gathering purposes, defense analyst with the Lexington Institute Loren Thompson suggests we have cause for concern:
"Space is a much bigger part of our military posture than it used to be, so any effort by the Chinese or anybody else to jam our satellites is potentially a big deal."
While these new devices merely jam the satellite signal over PRC territory, some are saying that it might be possible to disable satellites using lasers in the future… certainly something the U.S. is going to have to consider in spy satellite construction in the future.
