If we look at its achievements over the past decade, no one will doubt that China wants to win the new space race. Not only was it the only country to land on the Moon in about 40 years, and the first country on the other side, it also planted a flag on lunar soil and brought monsters back to Earth.
However, the race between various countries and private companies is far from over. China is now approaching Mars with its Tianwen-1 mission, which will arrive on February 10. A successful entry into a lane – the rover will only land in May – will be an important milestone for more than one reason.
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Mars may be close to Earth, but it’s a challenging target. Nothing demonstrates this better than the numbers. Of the 49 missions up to and including December 2020, only about 20 were successful. Not all of these failures were attempts by beginners or early attempts. In 2016, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli Mars Explorer crashed to the surface. Ongoing technical problems have also forced ESA and its Russian partner Roscosmos to postpone its next mission, ExoMars, until 2022.
China is not the only country near Mars. On February 9, a UAE inquiry, Hope, will attempt the same insertion maneuver. It is not a direct competitor of the Chinese mission (the probe will only revolve around the planet to study the weather of Mars), but (Nasa’s Perseverance Rover), which will arrive a week later, has been decided.
To further increase interest in China, among the handful of countries that have managed the infamous troublesome insertion maneuver in a lane, there is already one Asian country: India, China’s direct competitor in space but also on earth.
wikipedia, CC BY-SA
The Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), or Mangalyaan, reached Mars in 2014 – the first to reach it on its first mission. This is one of the reasons why a successful result of Tianwen-1 is so important for China’s status as the new space force: it is a way to reaffirm its space dominance over its neighbor. Unlike for India, this is not the first time China has attempted a mission to Mars (the previous one, Yinghuo-1, in 2011, failed with launch). On this occasion, however, the chances of success seem much better.
Space Age 2.0
Different countries have different development models when it comes to space, so the new space race is partly a competition to get the best approach. This reflects the specific character of the so-called Space Age 2.0, which compared to the first one seems more diverse, and where non-US actors, public and private, are prominent, especially Asian. If China leads the pack, so does its vision.
But there are bigger things at stake. The development effort behind China’s space sector is still largely funded by the government and led militarily. According to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional committee of the US government, China considers space as an “instrument of geopolitical and diplomatic competition”. Clearly, the cosmos, along with cyberspace, has become a fundamental new war zone, with the United States being the most important – but not the only – adversary. This means that commercial considerations are second to many countries, although it is becoming increasingly important in the overall scheme.
China has already drawn up five-year plans for its space activities, the latest of which ended in 2020 with more than 140 launches. More missions are planned: a new orbital space station, the recovery of marching monsters and a Jupiter exploratory mission among them.
Although the resources committed by the country are largely unknown (we only know what is included in the five-year plans), the US estimates for 2017 set this amount at US $ 11 billion (£ 8 billion), second only to the US itself – Nasa’s budget for the same year was about US $ 20 billion (£ 15 billion).
India followed a very different approach, where civil and commercial interests had long been predominant. Following the Nasa model of transparency, the country publishes reports on its activities and the annual spending (approximately US $ 1 billion annually (£ 740,000) of its space agency, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
Unlike in ambitions, scope and investments, the Indian space program has achieved remarkable successes, such as commercializing affordable launch services in countries eager to launch their own satellites into orbit. In 2017, India made a history with the largest number of satellites – 104 – ever launched on a single mission on a single mission, in addition to three foreign-owned and built (the record was only broken a few days ago by SpaceX, with 143 satellites). Even more impressive is the relatively low cost of India’s Mars mission, US $ 74 million (£ 55 million) – about ten times less expensive than Nasa’s Maven mission. The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, said that the whole mission costs less than the Hollywood movie, Gravity.
Due to geopolitical and rivalry issues, this may be about to change. The Indian government has released its annual report for 2019-20, which shows that military involvement in the space sector is growing. And another mission of the Moon and Venus is according to the Indian ISRO plans, if the Chinese were not yet motivated enough to make Tianwen-1 a resounding success. Space Race 2.0 is definitely warming up.