Planting a red flag on the far side of the moon?

On Saturday China's daring Chang'E-4 mission is scheduled to launch. It's objective is to put the first lander on the unexplored "far side" of the moon. It comes on the 50th anniversary of the first time humans saw the side of our satellite that cannot be seen from Earth.

In December 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Andrews became the first humans to leave the Earth and visit another heavenly body when they flew their Apollo 8 capsule around the moon. Not only were they the first to gaze down on the rugged terrain of the lunar far side, they took the first iconic image of the whole Earth rising above an alien horizon.

Now China is sending its robotic lander and rover with a suite of instruments, including, reportedly, a canister containing a mini-biosphere experiment with potato and mustard seeds and silkworm eggs, to the farthest reaches of the lunar surface. This follows on their previous success in 2013 with the successful landing on the moon of Chang'E-3 and its YUTU rover. It is all part of an ambitious Chinese program to eventually bring back samples from the moon and even send people there by the 2030s.

The far side of the moon is not dark — apologies to Pink Floyd. The moon is gravitationally locked to the Earth so one side is always facing towards us as it orbits around our planet every month. But with respect to the sun, the side that faces away from us still sees daylight and night time. It's just that a day on the moon is a month long, the same time it takes to orbit the Earth once.

Scientifically, the far side of the moon has great interest for many reasons. First of all, it is very different from the near side, lacking the vast "mare" or seas that make up the face of "the man in the moon." These areas are thought to be the remains of vast lava flows, possibly triggered by large impacts. The far side also has a larger number of well defined impact craters than the near side. Researchers haven't yet determined the reason for the difference, though it might be related to the near side having a thinner crust than the far side.

The backside of the moon is also a very quiet place, sheltered from the noisy radio transmissions buzzing around every part of the Earth.  This makes it very attractive to radio astronomers who would like to place telescopes there for an undisturbed look at the universe. One of goals of the Chinese mission is to measure just how "radio quiet" the far side really is is.

The Chinese have not historically been part of the big international cooperative missions in space, like the International Space Station.

They have chosen to go it alone in space, with a very steady, progressive program that has enabled them to develop their own rockets, launch satellites around the Earth and around the moon, send their own astronauts, or "Taikonauts" into space, build a small space station, (which deorbited earlier this year) and perform a spacewalk. 

This contrasts starkly with the country that put the first humans on the moon half a century ago. Currently, of course, the U.S. is still hitching rides on Russian rockets to reach even as far as the space station. However, they do have plans for the moon.

They're seeking partners for another space station which will be positioned in orbit around the moon called the Lunar Gateway. They've announced the intention to commence construction of it in 2022. The next stage of the plan, which hasn't been funded, is to send people back down to the surface by the late 2020s or early 2030s.  

That'll be around the same time the Chinese say they will attempt a human lunar landing.

That means there is a good chance that the next flag to be planted on the moon by a human will be Chinese and not American.