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China defends space program as peaceful Reuters China's space program will maintain steady long-term growth to serve strategic national interests, but it is peaceful in nature and costs just a fraction of NASA's spending, a senior official said on Tuesday. China launched its first lunar probe in October, the latest feat in an ambitious space program seeking scientific and military benefits as well as domestic political gains from its boost to patriotism. But some critics have questioned the ruling Communist Party's eagerness to clamber into the select ranks of global space powers even as hundreds of millions of Chinese struggle in rural hardship. "China's space cause always serves the overall national development strategy and needs," Chen Qiufa, vice minister of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, told an online chat on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).
"It will keep up stable growth in the long run." But China would stick to a principle of peaceful exploitation of space and would not engage in a space arms race. "Our lunar probe this time has no military purposes and the satellite does not carry any military device," he said of the Chang'e 1 orbiter, named after a legendary goddess.
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