Photo: Getty Images
In February unmanned spacecraft from China and the US will reach Mars, where both robbers will be sent to the icy surface, offering double images of its arid landscapes. It will probably take a decade or more before any human travels to the planet, but both countries want to gain the necessary expertise to dominate what lies beyond our atmosphere, with China with the aim of overtaking – or surpassing – the US that has made eight successful Mars landings since 1976. “Mars has moved into 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 is also getting closer to home, as the space gets bigger economic and military importance. NASA is working on plans to send astronauts back somewhere this decade to the moon, and China is preparing an unmanned moon mission for 2023 in preparation for an eventual journey by the astronauts there. This would follow a 2019 visit that would, for the first time, be an investigation into the farthest side of the moon, as well as the Chang’e-5 mission, which returns to earth in December lunar surface samples, something only the US and Soviet Union have done before.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover.
Source: NASA
China has been largely excluded from global initiatives such as the International Space Station because the US Congress banned NASA from collaborating with Chinese groups a decade ago. This prompted China to build its own space station, the first elements of which will be launched by the summer. The US restrictions have not prevented China from forming satellite partnerships with France, Italy and Brazil, and this year the Asian country wants to enter others for its lunar projects – to obtain extra funding and to increase national pride. “Every successful space mission is a tribute to President Mao and the old revolutionaries,” Chinese astronaut Zhang Xiaoguang said in a December speech in a museum dedicated to Mao Zedong.
Dozens of private spatial enterprises have also sprung up. Galaxy Space, a startup backed by billionaire Lei Jun, operates China’s first 5G low-band broadband satellite, launched last year, and the company plans a factory that can produce as many as 500 satellites annually. This effort is one of several Chinese initiatives aimed at establishing 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 equipment such as Galactic Space, which in November became 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 exploring on the moon from science fiction to a solvable logistics challenge, in 2020 NASA has the Artemis Agreements, an international agreement that allows countries or companies to establish exclusive zones on the moon. China did not report, and the Global Times, an official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, denounced the chords as an American ‘political agenda of lunar colonization’.
President Biden will have to choose whether to confront China with its spatial initiatives or find ways to alleviate 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 are precedents for countries that set aside terrestrial differences in space – especially the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission during the Cold War in 1975. “I do not think cooperation with China is impossible,” she says. “History tells us it can be done.”
Read the following: China likes Elon Musk and Tesla. How long will it take?