NASA administrator and former astronaut Charles Bolden has arrived in China for a six-day official visit, which he has described as an “introductory” visit that might include talks pertaining to the potential chances of future cooperation for human spaceflight.

Bolden’s trip to China not only comes at the time of disruption of the US human spaceflight program, but also within two weeks of the successful launch of a second Chinese lunar probe, Chang'e-2 – which is part of a programme that seeks sending humans to the Moon by 2020.

Incidentally, while the US had earlier this year abandoned its Constellation programme that chiefly sought to return Americans to the Moon as a prologue to the conquest of Mars; China has recently been making substantial investments in it space programme. 

With the trip, at the invitation of Chinese space officials, coming amid growing buzz among observers in Washington about Bolden’s apparently uncertain term at as the NASA chief, Keith Cowing, editor of the website NASAWatch, said that Bolden is “sort of viewing the trip as a victory lap.”

Noting that the relations been US and China have been very bad of late, due to political and economic reasons, space analyst Morris Jones told Al Jazeera that the main reason fro Bolden’s China visit is “to shake a few hands. It's the first step in a very long process to get co-operation between the US and China in space flight.”