How to Handle the Growing China Space Threat
Planet Earth from Space, People's Republic of China warm glow highlighted state borders and counties animation, city lights, 3d illustration
Originally published by National Review
America must keep pace to prevent China from achieving strategic superiority.
With the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announcing plans to conduct over 40 orbital launches in 2021 with “the [Communist] Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core,” will the U.S. finally take the growing space threat from China as seriously as it should?
China aims to land on the moon and build a base there by the decade’s end. If its recent success at landing a rover on the moon’s far side is any indication, it’s advancing at a much quicker pace than we are. In fact, at the end of last year, the country planted the People’s Republic flag on the lunar surface and became the first country to execute robotic docking in lunar orbit.
These developments are troubling. The Pentagon has warned that China is building up an arsenal of space weaponry, and it is doing it quickly, putting American space infrastructure at a great disadvantage. The People’s Republic of China is explicitly looking to supersede America, and it seems willing to do anything it can to make that happen.
Past congressional bodies have recognized the unique danger that China poses to our space program. It thus passed restrictions disallowing cooperation between the two nations’ space programs without special congressional approval. Now the threat from the communist regime has grown stronger than ever before, and Congress needs to do more to protect the nation from its abuses.
In his September Senate testimony, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, made it clear that China is increasingly looking to undermine our space investments, including through conducting espionage that could aid the Chinese military. The growing sophistication of digital espionage and the burgeoning presence of nontraditional commercial partners lends new avenues for adversaries to breach the U.S.’s current security system.
