China is Winning the Space RaceDon't laugh. In less than a decade, Beijing will likely be the world's most important player in outer space.
On June 11, in the flat and featureless Gobi Desert, China took a giant leap for mankind -- or at least a symbolic step toward space dominance -- when it sent three astronauts into space for 15 days. With the past as a guide, both that launch and the 2010 launch of the Chang'e 2 unmanned lunar orbiter are technologically unimpressive. Shift the focus to the present and they are merely unsettling. But look to the future, and they are unmistakable warning signs that China may surpass the United States and Russia to become the world's preeminent spacefaring power.
Yes, launching a three-seat space capsule and docking it with a temporary space station is straight out of the bell-bottom jeans and wide-collar era: it merely replicates what Americans achieved in 1973 with their Skylab 2 mission. With only one main chamber, the diminutive Tiangong 1 space station is far less impressive and barely one-tenth the size of Skylab, not to mention the even larger, elaborately segmented structure of modules, docking ports, and solar arrays that make up the International Space Station (ISS), the largest artificial object in Earth orbit.
Why worry that the Chinese are exploiting 40-year-old technology to send a few men and women into space? Won't it take them decades to catch up? Won't they be daunted by the same engineering and medical scientific barriers that have stalled their predecessors in low Earth orbit, like damage to spacecraft from micrometeorite impacts, and damage to human bodies from exposure to cosmic radiation and weightlessness? And isn't the space race dead anyway?
Not necessarily. The Chinese have not only matched many of the achievements of the Americans and Russians in space -- and in far less time than it took their predecessors to reach the same milestones -- they did so while avoiding their biggest mistakes. For example, rather than investing in customized, expensive space shuttles like both Washington and Moscow banked on, the Chinese are using reliable, mass-producible spacecraft, like the Soyuz capsule.
And the Chinese space program enjoys some important advantages over its U.S. rival. As the recent surge in missions attests, the Chinese space program likely enjoys generous and stable government funding -- though the exact amount is unknown. (Meanwhile, NASA's budget as a percent of the federal budget has fallen from 4.41 percent in 1966 to 0.48 percent in 2012.) And the Chinese space program has the support of a unified Chinese leadership: China's President Xi Jinping won't be shutting down the Shenzhou missions to diminish the legacy of his predecessors, as President Richard Nixon did by ending manned lunar exploration.
The United States may have given up on the space dream, but it still burns brightly in the Chinese psyche. Among the most important -- if unquantifiable -- resources Beijing possesses is an extraordinary sense of historical grievance. Chinese nationalists are conscious of almost two centuries of national humiliation at the hands of other great powers, attributable to Chinese military technological backwardness. Anxiety about technology transfers prompted the Pentagon to reject Chinese participation in the ISS, a decision that has drawn little objection from the other 14 participating countries -- and of which some Chinese nationalists are keenly aware. The United States and its allies are even encircling China in orbital space, or so the thinking goes.