China soft lands a probe on Mars.

[Anomalocaris]

Good.

Neither the governments of China, The USA or the former Soviet Union have any real vision when it comes to space exploration. But they have plenty of vision when it comes to being upstaged by their rivals - especially the USA.

That is not entirely fair.   For much of last 30 years, NASA faced no serious danger of being upstaged by anyone in Mars exploration, yet it did persevere with a more or less systematic program of surface and orbital robotic exploration of Mars with numerous orbital and lander missions

Although the Chinese did just crash the party, they gave no indication of pursuing a systematic Mars exploration program beyond Tianwen-1 and have announced no additional orbital or surface Mars missions, while NASA has a string of additional missions lined up through the 2020s.

The orbital astronomy observatory program of NASA, whose flagship is the Hubble Space Telescope, also systematically covered the spectrum with Compton gamma Ray orbital telescope, Chandra X-Ray orbital telescope, Spitzer infra-red telescope, Kepler exoplanet telescope, despite facing no serious danger of being upstaged until recently.   It’s next step is the James Webb telescope scheduled to be launched later this year being its next flagship.

The Chinese announced their own Hubble equivalent to crash this party too in 2024.   Their scope is expected to match Hubble’s resolution, but upstage it by being able to cover 300 times more sky with each shot compared to Hubble.   This give it capability to image the entire sky over its expected life, something neither Hubble nor JW can come close to doing.   But that is also china’s sole announced foray into high end orbital astronomical observatory.  There is no other announced observatory to round out any systematic program of science.

There is also NASA’s outer solar system exploration program that featured an entire fleet of probes to explore different aspects of the outer solar system.     The Chinese also announced plans to crash this party in their characteristic way, by launching a pair of probes around 2025 to explore the heliopause and then exit the solar system in 25 years, faster than any previous probe, but this is again not accompanied by any follow up road map for additional systematic scientific missions.

So it does seem the NASA program has systematic expansion of planetary and astronomic science high in lost of priorities, while the Chinese program is focused on showing China can match America’s signal gadgets in space based planetary and astronomy science, but there is no follow up aimed to match the American programs’ actual scientific output.