On November 4 a Reuters story reported that “state media” in China had quoted a “leading scientist” saying that China planned on sending a man to the Moon by 2017, a year before NASA does.
There were many things wrong with this claim. The article originally appeared not in “state media,” but in a Chinese tabloid newspaper known”in China anyway”for its sensationalized reporting. The scientist who was quoted works on the Chinese robotic space program, not the human program, and was most likely misquoted. None of the Western reporters bothered to question the original news source nor the qualifications of the scientist who had supposedly made those remarks.