![]() How worried should Washington be? If you talk to those studying the national security implications of a preeminent Chinese space power, the U.S. “That could apply to the West’s appreciation of China’s growing space capabilities and ambitions,” says Pace, now director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. A character in the novel asks, “How did you go bankrupt?” The reply: “Gradually, then suddenly.” How did we get here? Scott Pace, who served as executive secretary of the White House National Space Council in the Trump administration, likes to cite a line from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” to describe how Beijing went from an also-ran to a space juggernaut. ![]() The consequences of China’s first anti-satellite test in 2007 still endure, due to the thousands of pieces of space debris it created when destroying one of its own satellites that still pose a threat to spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The Pentagon recently reported to Congress that Beijing “has devoted significant resources to growing all aspects of its space program, from military space applications to civil applications such as profit-generating launches, scientific endeavors, and space exploration.” And a top admiral this month warned that China is “on the march” toward developing offensive weapons that could jam or destroy satellites in orbit. Unlike the Cold War race between Washington and Moscow, however, this expanding competition is about far more than planting a flag: It’s about seizing the high ground for military advantage and turning space into a commercial engine that could change life on Earth. Meanwhile, Beijing is designing a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle like SpaceX's Starship for deep space missions and recently inked a partnership with Russia to build a research base on the moon. A Chinese roveris operating on the Martian surface alongside two from the United States. It has retrieved samples from the moon and orbited a remote spacecraft around it. It now has a fully manned space station from which Chinese taikonauts just conducted their first space walk. ![]() In policy circles, when you hear talk about the “new space race,” it is almost always uttered in the same breath as China - not Russia, which was the United States’ main competitor in the first era of the space age.īeijing has logged a series of head-spinning achievements in the past few years. ![]() The billionaires have gotten most of the attention but there’s a bigger space race heating up - one between the United States and China that could determine the dominant space power of the coming decades. John Yearwood, global news editorįormer Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is expected to blast into space on Tuesday, nine days behind fellow billionaire Richard Branson. Prior to joining POLITICO as defense editor in 2015, Bryan was the Pentagon correspondent for the Boston Globe for 14 years and the chief Washington correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly. This week’s guest host is Bryan Bender, POLITICO’s senior national correspondent who covers defense and pilots POLITICO Space, a weekly take on astropolitics.
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