Although they have experience with landing robotic craft on the Moon, launching a Moon orbiter before a lander is a better approach for the Russians because they need to re-learn how to walk before they can start to run. In late 2011 they suffered an embarrassing failure of their overly-ambitious Fobos-Grunt mission. The spacecraft fell silent almost immediately after launch, circled the Earth for a few weeks, and finally reentered. Many independent observers had predicted that Fobos-Grunt would fail because it was too complicated for a space program that had not built a planetary spacecraft in over a decade and a half (see “Red moon around a red planet,” The Space Review, November 7, 2011). The only real surprise was that the spacecraft failed so early, probably a sign that Russian quality control and systems engineering are both in bad shape, something that has been reinforced by a series of launch vehicle problems.
This is exciting, I wasn't aware of how close the Chinese are to landing a craft there -this year apparently. I felt some empathy for Russia after reading this "In late 2011 they suffered an embarrassing failure of their overly-ambitious Fobos-Grunt mission. The spacecraft fell silent almost immediately after launch..." -It hit close to home
The chinese are doing some wild stuff. Most people aren't aware that they've got a space station up right now.
It's not a manned mission, and I doubt their probe will be designed to knock our flag over. And if they can land their probe on one of the US flags with that kind of accuracy I'd be impressed and say it was worth it. :)
I really hope this starts up another Space Race. Then maybe we'll get off of our asses and do something.
This is great, the more space exploration and returning to the moon, the better. Especially coming from other countries. I hope that as more and more countries reach the moon and develop the engineering and materials ability to do so, that it will catch on in the American media. From there, I would hope that people start to question what we've been doing with our Space Program, hopefully to the point where Politicians have to allocate more money for it to please their constituents.
We just sent an unmanned mission to Mars. I don't think the Russians sending one to the moon is going to embarrass our space program any. They're NASA and they know it. Russia (and China) doing more in space is great, but not because it's going to start another space race.