Officially, the moon belongs to us all. China and the US are among the many nations which have ratified the 1967 outer space treaty, which loftily declares that exploration and use of the moon shall be carried out "for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind". In article IV, the treaty states that the moon is to be used "exclusively for peaceful purposes" and nothing that has been announced by China is in breach of these agreements. But the US is unlikely to take the latest lunar news with any kind of equanimity. To Mr Bush's White House, and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon in particular, a Chinese base on the moon is neither a small step for a man nor a giant leap for mankind, but an intensely provocative challenge to American global, not to say galactic, supremacy. Before he took office, Mr Rumsfeld headed a commission which warned that America could face a "Space Pearl Harbor". Though his report - which he himself later accepted in full - recommitted the US to the peaceful use of space, all its practical conclusions were military, endorsing the standard Pentagon belief that peace, whether on earth or in space, can only be maintained by American weapons superiority. Many other hurdles stand between the Chinese and the fulfilment of their ambitions on the moon, but American hostility is among the biggest. The answer to this looming confrontation ought to be clear. To prevent the moon from becoming a battleground, China, the US and Russia should work together on future lunar projects. Only that way can the moon truly be "the province of all mankind".
More than 40 years have passed since President Kennedy told his aides, in the wake of the first Russian manned space flight, that if the US did not respond quickly, then the first man on the moon will be called Ivan. It is easy to imagine a similar conversation in George Bush's White House this week in response to news that China aims to have a scientific base on the moon by the year 2010. "Everything is ready to be set in motion," Professor Ouyang Ziyuan told an audience. China plans a manned space flight three years from now; five years after that, Chinese scientists hope to set up a base to begin exploiting the moon's "rich resources". So if the US does not get its act together quickly this time, the man in the moon is going to be called Wu.