The muted reaction was a sign that the novelty of the country’s space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties.
BEIJING — Hours after a space probe from China made humanity’s first landing on the far side of the moon, sending images of its surroundings back to Earth, scientists on Thursday were waiting for it to deploy a rover that would take still more photographs and scan the surface of terrain never before traversed.
On China’s most-watched TV news program, it wasn’t among the four top stories.
Chinese scientists hailed the landing of the Chang’e-4 probe as evidence of the country’s growing stature in space exploration. “It is human nature to explore the unknown world,” Wu Weiren, chief designer of the lunar mission for the China National Space Administration, said in an interview on the state television network, CCTV. “And it is what our generation and the next generation are supposed to do.”
But compared to previous missions — including those that carried 11 Chinese astronauts into space — reaction to Thursday’s landing seemed strikingly restrained, both in the country’s state-run news outlets and on social media.
The doodle of China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, paid subtle homage to the lander and its rover, but the news was relegated to the fifth item on CCTV’s 7 p.m. news program. It followed three reports on the doings of the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, and an item on a new government zone being developed outside Beijing. In interviews, several people said they had paid little attention to the moon landing.
The muted reaction was a sign that the novelty of the country’s space missions has faded.
