[demallien]

Well that sucks.

Is anyone here a big follower of the Chinese space programme? I follow "western" space efforts pretty closely, but with heavy military involvement, a preoccupation with face-saving, and the language barrier, I find the Chinese programme nigh on impossible to track. Do they have the same sort of spending split that NASA has with respect to the manned v. unmanned programmes? Or does their unmanned programme get substantially more than a pittance? As things stand, I'm not even able to tell if they are actually serious about space outside of military use, or if it's all just a prestige play. Anyone care to fill in some detail?

[dengnan]

We, Chinese, do not know too much details either. It is hard for us to know details about the spending.

I tried to google it with key words like "Chang'e budget", but found nothing useful. However, I did found an article about the history[0]. Here is some fact: Back to 90s, there were Chinese scientists suggesting for lunar exploration. But the projects requires a budget around 1.5B, which was declined by the prime minister LI Peng (Family name first.)

0. http://www.baike.com/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E6%8E%A2%E6%9C%...

[SEJeff]

I wish the Chinese space program the best. Every success pushes mankind (all nationalities) forward in our understanding of the universe.

[TrainedMonkey]

That. Hopefully we can get another space race this time against China. Sending people to Mars or establishing moon colony for example.

[SEJeff]

I suspect Elon Musk will win that one and as a result America :)

SpaceX is doing quite well thusfar.

[df41]

I spent 2 minutes with google and it seems the closest I could get is this: http://news.qq.com/a/20120625/000134.htm Basically it says the total spending on manned space missions is less than RMB 40B from 1992 to 2013. That translates to about 6.7B in current ratio.

2 NEST to send man to space. Not too bad IMO.