This is

this is CBS, I am the world. I'm John Bachelor.

China's space program is non-transparent.

Bob Zimmerman is here.

He keeps the website behind the black

to give a wonderful illustration of what it means non-transparent space program.

Bob, a very good evening to you.

China's in trouble.

What happened? This is a really, as you say, transparency, this is a very puzzling story. On March 13th, China did a launch in which they put saddle they tried to put two satellites into orbit apparently on a lunar mission.

This was totally classified they released no, but there was enough data available

after some digging to determine that the two small spacecraft that were launched were

intended as a lunar mission, go to the moon and actually test some

kind of communications technology between those spacecraft, each other in lunar orbit and then another spacecraft in Earth orbit, low Earth orbit.

That's what we think is the case, but they haven't told us anything.

Matter of fact, when they did the launch, they told us nothing at all about it at all you had to dig

the finest previously published material referencing these spacecraft. When the

launch occurred the upper stage of the rocket didn't fire as planned and so

the spacecraft did not get into the orbit they wanted to put it in so it was

considered a law failure.

I didn't even count this into my launch records because the launch was considered a failure.

But it now appears that Chinese engineers are attempting to save this classified

lunar mission. They have been slowly raising the orbit the spacecraft were in so

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