This time, China may get to moon 1st By Traci Watson, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — China is on track to put humans on the moon before the United States can return there, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told a House panel Thursday.
If NASA continues to receive its current level of funding, it will return astronauts to the moon in 2019, Griffin told the House Science and Technology Committee. A "few billion extra" dollars would allow NASA to send crews to the moon in 2017, he said. President Bush ordered NASA to send humans back to the moon by 2020 for the first time since 1972.
Griffin said it "would be easily possible" for the Chinese to put humans on the lunar surface "within a decade." China launched two taikonauts into orbit in 2005. A Chinese robotic probe to the moon is scheduled to blast off this year.
Griffin said China's space program has roughly the same capabilities as the USA's Gemini program, which first flew four years before NASA landed a man on the moon in 1969. "I don't think we're in a race with any nation," he said, but "it is important to me personally that the U.S. be clearly the (leader) in space in the world."
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