The Race for Mars Takes China-U.S. Tensions Into Outer Space

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In February unmanned spacecraft from China and the U.S. are scheduled to reach Mars, where both will dispatch rovers to the frigid surface, offering dueling images of its barren landscapes. It will probably be a decade or more before any humans travel to the planet, but both countries want to gain the expertise needed to dominate what lies beyond our atmosphere, with China aiming to catch up to—or outdo—the U.S., which has made eight successful Mars landings since 1976. “Mars has moved into the symbolic role of demonstrating the superiority of technology,” says Alice Gorman, an associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, specializing in space archeology.

Their competition is heating up closer to home, too, as space takes on greater economic and military importance. NASA is working on plans to return astronauts to the moon sometime this decade, and China is preparing an unmanned lunar mission for 2023 in preparation for an eventual trip there by its astronauts. That would follow up a 2019 visit that for the first time sent a probe to the far side of the moon, as well as the Chang’e-5 mission, which returned to Earth in December carrying samples from the moon’s surface, something only the U.S. and the Soviet Union had done before.

China has been largely shut out of global initiatives such as the International Space Station because the U.S. Congress a decade ago barred NASA from cooperating with Chinese groups. That’s spurred China to build its own space station, the first elements of which are scheduled to be launched by this summer. The U.S. restrictions haven’t stopped China from forming satellite partnerships with France, Italy, and Brazil, and this year the Asian country aims to sign up others for its lunar projects—both to secure extra funding and to boost national pride. “Every successful space mission is a tribute to Chairman Mao and the old revolutionaries,” Chinese astronaut Zhang Xiaoguang said in a December speech at a museum devoted to Mao Zedong.

Dozens of private space ventures have sprung up, too. Galaxy Space, a startup backed by billionaire Lei Jun, operates China’s first low-Earth-orbit 5G broadband satellite, launched last year, and the company is planning a factory capable of producing as many as 500 satellites annually. That 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 will likely be put into orbit by outfits 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 mining on the moon shifting from science fiction to solvable logistical challenge, NASA in 2020 unveiled the Artemis Accords, an international agreement allowing countries or companies to establish exclusive zones on the moon. China didn’t sign on, and the Global Times, an official Communist Party mouthpiece, denounced the accords as bolstering a U.S. “political agenda of moon colonization.”

President Biden will have to choose whether to confront China on its space initiatives or find ways to ease tensions and even increase collaboration. Wendy Whitman Cobb, an associate professor at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies in Montgomery, Ala., says there’s precedent for countries setting aside Earth-bound differences in space—in particular 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 it can be done.”
 
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