China’s Shenzhou-9 mission, now winding down with a landing expected later this week, has not made than big of an impact on the American political psyche, it appears. Whether it’s because Americans are distracted by other issues, or because the Chinese achievement—including the first crewed docking with a proto-space station—doesn’t seem that impressive, there hasn’t been that much hand-wringing about China overtaking the US in space, beating the US to the Moon, or other concerns.
“China is not overtaking the United States in space. It is, however, advancing,” wrote Joan Johnson-Freese in an essay for CNN. That advance is slow, she noted, but could pose a risk if the US shows impatience regarding its own long-term plans for human exploration beyond Earth orbit. “The real danger for the United States is in ceding space exploration and leadership to China because it lacks the political will to proceed at a steady, supportable pace. This will have broad strategic implications.”
One op-ed that has raised concern about China’s plans is an essay in Foreign Policy by John Hickman, who worries about China’s long-term plans to eventually send humans to the Moon could lead them to claim lunar territory—perhaps the entire Moon—as their own. “Even if it seems like science fiction, though, the ramifications are so vast that the possibility needs to be taken seriously,” he warns. “If Beijing did decide to annex the moon, or even just part of it, doing so would undermine the current international legal regime in space, encouraging other countries to annex their own extraterrestrial territory.”
That claim was pooh-poohed by the Chinese publication Global Times in a commentary there Tuesday. “This ludicrous, aggressive perspective discloses the distorted mentality of a few Americans facing the rapid rise of China,” wrote Han Zhu. “They actually see the moon, where the US put a man four decades ago, as US territory where other countries can’t venture. This is a minority view, but a disturbing one.” Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow expressed similar concerns about China claiming the Moon last year, while top US experts on China’s space program said there was no evidence China was interested in making territorial claims on the Moon.
On of those experts, Dean Cheng of The Heritage Foundation, will be speaking at a Marshall Institute event Friday on “China’s Space Program: Assessing the Implications for the U.S.”, along with Kevin Pollpeter and former House staffer Leslee Gilbert. In a blog post shortly before the Shenzhou-9 launch, Cheng reviewed China’s space ambitions, both human and robotic, and concluded, “For the U.S., the question is whether there will be a coherent response to the Chinese challenge.”