Last week China announced that it was planning send a rover to Mars by 2020 and bring back samples from the Red Planet just 10 years later. Ouyang Ziyuan, the Chinese scientist who oversaw the country's successful Moon rover mission in December last year, said that this would be just the first step in the country's plans to explore the solar system – with further plans involving sending probes to the Sun.

The US aerospace industry may be having something of a minor boom at the moment as private companies such as Elon Musk's SpaceX celebrate engineering successes, but America still can't match China's budget nor its concentration of political will.