This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague Bob Zimmerman. China, the Earth Moon system.

China puts three satellites up, a constellation of them, in lunar space. Why? Bob explains, China has a plan, a plan to get to the moon.

It's following through on its plan very, very strictly.

Is Bob Zimmerman to explain.

China's plan for the Earth-Moon system.

More of this tonight.

No, lunar space meaning it's far from Earth, but they call it cis-luner.

I just don't like that term because it's kind of jogging.

But what China did was it wanted to test communications linking between multiple satellites

in deep space and also test them working linked with Earth orbit as well.

So they did this.

This is a technology test satellite constellation.

They sent two satellites to deep space, essentially lunar space, but maybe beyond the moon

or in it, in what's called a retrograde orbit that includes the Earth's moon system.

And those two satellites were in kind of different places in this lunar space region,

maybe a million miles plus from Earth.

And one of the third satellite was in Earth orbit.

And they have tested now with those three satellites, communication links and the technology

necessarily used this.

And this is part of if you're going to have any kind of lunar base, you want to have

full-time communications, and you're going to need a constellation of satellites in space

to do it.

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