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China takes an interesting approach to it's space program.
November 3, 2014
China Daily
The head of China's lunar probe (click here) program has called for a thorough analysis of data collected from the test lunar orbiter, which returned on Saturday, to speed up work on Chang'e-5 and its 2017 lunar mission.
The lunar orbiter, nicknamed Xiaofei on Chinese social networks, landed in Siziwang Banner, in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, early Saturday morning after an eight-day flight. China has joined the Soviet Union and the United States to become the third nation to realize a return mission to the moon.
Search teams have already recovered the orbiter at the designated landing area, about 500 kilometers from Beijing.
Launched on Oct 24, the orbiter traveled 840,000 kilometers on a mission that saw it circle the far side of the moon and photograph the Earth and moon together.
The re-entry process began at around 6:13 am with the orbiter approaching Earth at a velocity of about 11.2 km per second.
To help it slow down, the craft is designed to "bounce" off the edge of the atmosphere before re-entering, a process compared to a stone skimming across water, and so shorten the "braking distance" for the orbiter, according to Zhou Jianliang, chief engineer with the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center....
