Photo: Getty Images
In February, unmanned spacecraft came out China and the US will reach Mars, where both rovers will send to the icy surface and offer dueling images of its arid landscapes. It will likely take a decade or more for humans to travel to the planet, but both countries want to gain the expertise needed to dominate what lies beyond our atmosphere, with China with the goal of overtaking – or surpassing – the US which has made eight successful Mars landings since 1976. “Mars has been given the symbolic role of demonstrating the superiority of technology,” said Alice Gorman, an associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, specializing in space archeology.
Their competition also increases closer to home as the space expands economic and military importance. NASA is working on plans to return astronauts to the moon sometime this decade, and China is preparing an unmanned moon mission for 2023 in preparation for a possible trip there by its astronauts. That would be a follow-up to a visit in 2019 that sent a probe to the other side of the moon, as well as the Chang’e-5 mission, which will be launched in December with samples of the lunar surface, something only the US and the Soviet Union had done before.
NASAs Curiosity robber.
Source: NASA
China has been largely excluded from global initiatives such as the International Space Station, because the US Congress banned NASA from partnering with Chinese groups a decade ago. That has spurred China to build its own space station, with the first elements expected to be launched by this summer. The US restrictions have not stopped China from entering into satellite partnerships with France, Italy and Brazil, and this year the Asian country wants to sign others for its lunar projects – both to get additional funding and boost national pride. “Every successful space mission is a tribute to Chairman Mao and the ancient revolutionaries,” said Chinese astronaut Zhang Xiaoguang in a December speech at a museum dedicated to Mao Zedong.
Dozens of private space ventures have also emerged. Galaxy Space, a startup backed by billionaire Lei Jun operates China’s first 5G low-orbit broadband satellite, launched last year, and the company is planning a factory capable of producing up to 500 satellites annually. That effort is one of many Chinese initiatives to establish a competitor to Starlink, Elon Musk’s proposed network of tens of thousands of low-flying satellites to provide broadband access. China’s systems are likely to be put into orbit by outfits such as Galactic Space, which became the second Chinese company to launch a satellite in November. The first, ISpace, raised 1.2 billion yuan ($ 185 million) in August from investors led by Sequoia Capital China.
With the prospect of mining on the moon shifting from science fiction to solvable logistics challenge, in 2020 NASA unveiled the Artemis Accords, an international agreement that allows countries or companies to establish exclusive zones on the moon. China has not signed up and the Worldwide times, an official mouthpiece for the Communist Party, denounced the accords as strengthening an American “political agenda of lunar colonization.”
President Biden will have to choose whether to confront China with its space initiatives or find ways to ease tensions and even increase cooperation. Wendy Whitman Cobb, associate professor at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies in Montgomery, Ala., Says there is precedent for countries setting aside Earth-bound differences in space – particularly the joint Apollo. Soyuz mission during the Cold War in 1975. “I don’t think cooperation with China is impossible,” she says. “History tells us that it is possible.”
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