Photo: Getty Images
In February an unmanned spacecraft from China and the U.S. plans to reach Mars, where the two send filters to the frigid surface, offering dual images of its barren landscapes. It may be ten years or more before anyone travels to the planet, but both countries want the knowledge needed to take control of what is outside our senses, with China aims to capture – or overthrow – the U.S., which has successfully landed on Mars since 1976. “Mars has moved into its symbolic role in showing excellence technology, ”says Alice Gorman, associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, specializing in space archeology.
Their competition is heating up closer to home, too, as space takes up more economic and military importance. NASA is working on plans to return astronauts to the moon sometime in this decade, with China preparing an unmanned moon mission for 2023 in preparation for one last trip there with the astronauts. That would follow on from the 2019 tour that sent, for the first time, a probe to the across the moon, as well as the Chang’e-5 mission, which returned to Earth in December carrying samples from the lunar surface, something that only the US and the Soviet Union had done before.
NASA’s Curiosity rover.
Source: NASA
China was largely excluded from global missions such as the International Space Station because the U.S. Congress banned NASA a decade from cooperating with Chinese agencies. That forced China to build has its own space station, the first of which is expected to launch before this summer. U.S. restrictions have not stopped China from forming satellite partnerships with France, Italy and Brazil, and this year an Asian country is aiming to sign others for its lunar projects – both to fund to gain more and to promote national pride. “Every successful space trip is a tribute to Chairman Mao and the ancient revolutionaries,” Chinese astronaut Zhang Xiaoguang said in a speech in December at a museum dedicated to Mao Zedong.
Dozens of private space ventures have also risen. Galaxy Space, a startup company backed by a billionaire Lei Jun, operates the first low-Earth-orbit 5G broadband satellite, which was launched last year, and the company is designing a factory capable of delivering as many as 500 satellites out every year. That effort is one of several Chinese initiatives aimed at establishing a competitor to Starlink, Elon Musk’s a proposed network of tens of thousands of low-flying satellites to provide broadband access. Chinese systems are likely to be orbited by outer spacecraft such as Galactic Space, which arrived in November as the second Chinese company to launch a satellite. 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 moving from science fiction to a more or less realistic challenge, NASA unveiled in 2020 Artemis Accords, an international agreement that allows countries or companies to establish exclusive zones on the moon. China has not signed it, and the Global Times, the official oral statement of the Communist Party, denies that the boxes strengthened the “political agenda of the U.S. lunar colony. ”
President Biden must choose whether to go against China on its space missions or find ways to reduce tensions and even increase cooperation. Wendy Whitman Cobb, an associate professor at the U.S. Air Force School of Aeronautics and Space Studies in Montgomery, Ala., Says there is a desert for countries that put space differences on Earth – especially the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission in the Cold War of 1975. “I do not think cooperation with China is impossible,” she says. “History tells us it can be done.”
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