Live coverage started.

Video: http://english.cntv.cn/live/

Text: http://live.china.org.cn/2013/12/13/coming-soon-change-3-lan...

Landing success. Congrats to China. Rover will be deployed from lander few hours (8 hrs?) later.

Landing video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnM-sJ-KbNg

Direct streaming via mms://wmv3.china.com.cn/live2?cccode=cc1291 (lags a lot for me)

CCTV live stream begins at 11:00 UTC. Landing scheduled for around 13:40 UTC, 14th Dec.

That's a couple of hours than they originally scheduled. I wonder what caused the change?

The surveillance baseline only has a length of eight hours or so, so they don't have much leeway in actual landing window if they need the touch-down to be visible.

Here's a compilation of latest news ( from yesterday )

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/1213091...

Do you have a link to a live stream?

Not yet. Looks like 4 more hours to go for live stream to begin. I'm following this thread for updates:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=33511.0

Edit:

Live stream will be at: http://english.cntv.cn/live/

Planetary Society blog: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/1213091...

Stream is now live, landing should be around 13:40 UTC IIRC.

CCTV have just ( as of 11:30 UTC ) announced live coverage from 20:00 to 22:00 Beijing Time.

link to a live stream:

http://news.cntv.cn/special/videolive/change3/index.shtml

Well, let's hope they succeed!

Yep.

Hope people can put politics aside and appreciate another step forward for humanity and science.

Good luck to all involved!

Put politics aside?

Nationalism is all we've got to push forward space exploration; While there were initially subtexts involving spy satellites and nuclear weapons, the tech has been there for forty years, and forty years ago we stopped making progress and settled into a holding pattern involving the Shuttle and a modest space station in some sort of 'spirit of cooperation' that is earmark- rather than goal-oriented.

I can only hope China's national inferiority complex is intense enough to propel human beings beyond low earth orbit once more, and shame us out of our hyperpower exceptionalism. Yes, shame - Russia can send someone to the ISS and the US cannot - and without the US feeling ashamed of that, there is no Dragon, no Dream Chaser, no Orion.

Without a political space race, there's no resources for this sort of thing except for the passing billionaire.

"Nationalism is all we've got to push forward space exploration"

What about the Google X-Prize for the moon lander? Several teams are competing. There are certainly other ways to push technologies forward. X-Prizes help. Finding other ways to tap into the $15 trillion US economy would help too.

All true but a "political space race" can have a bad ending as well.

I think another space race would be a good thing actually.

In fact I think it's how we should solve all our international disputes: First country to put a man on mars gets the South China Sea.

Can non-nations apply?

(Thinking of the South Musk Sea)

But... putting a man on Mars takes a good chunk of his life for no gain to anyone. Why not "first country to build a 700-foot traditional stone pyramid"? "First country to paint 30% of its land area blue"?

I'd be more excited about getting people to Mars, and so would presumably many other - and it'd provide much more advances and gains than building a pyramid.

Alive or dead?

They are going to die anyway.

Good to see someone heating up the space race again. Hope to see awesome retaliations from other agencies.

Congrats to China. It was really exciting to see it live.

I can't wait until we have realtime streaming video feeds from other vehicles documenting other landings in progress.

Edit: Spelling and words.

We are getting there, seen as how MRO managed to snap a picture of Curiosity's descent.

Or how NASA tried to work with India (Chandrayaan-1 and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) to perform a bistatic radar experiment. I find the idea of two entirely diferent crafts operated by two countries and working together to be fascinating.