Leonard David on the Chinese Space Program this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

If you're a space geek like me, you probably... I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

If you're a space geek like me, you probably don't need me to introduce Leonard David.

He is the space journalist extraordinaire, and now he has written at space dot com about China's

apparently ambitious plans for space exploration. We'll also hear from Bill Nye

Bruce Bats and starting right now the Planetary Society senior editor Emily

locked walla. Emily I was delighted to see your blog entry of August 22nd about

the Laddie mission because of a special event we have coming up.

But first, tell us about this latest spacecraft headed for the moon.

Well, it's a very small spacecraft, a very inexpensive spacecraft, and for those of us who really

like pictures from space, you might be a little bit

disappointed because there's no camera on it but it's studying something kind of

important about the moon and that's its atmosphere and its dust environment

now the moon doesn't have much of an atmosphere. It's a lot like

mercury where the molecules in the atmosphere are so far apart that that actually

the odds of one molecule hitting another molecule are basically virtually zero.

So it's very, very sparse.

But it's interacting directly with the surface and studying these atmospheres help us understand the processes

that happen on the surfaces and in the case of the moon's

studying the moon's atmosphere will actually go back and help us learn a little

...