“The Financial Times reports that China is attempting to become an “all-around superpower” and is actively expanding its space sector in a clear bid to compete with the United States. The outside world is still confused as to what this “super-American” ambition is all about.
China is very ambitious in the space field, such as trying to create a space station that can compete with the International Space Station (ISS), creating a satellite positioning system, building the largest aperture telescope, and also aiming to become the second country after the United States to land a rover on Mars; before that, China was the country that launched the most rockets in 2018 and became the first country to land a rover on the back of the moon in 2019. .
China and the United States have been able to cooperate in fewer and fewer areas, and the space business has been competitive almost from the beginning. The United States passed a bill in 2011 that banned NASA from cooperating with the Chinese scientific community, leaving China excluded from the International Space Station.
China’s space success is a source of legitimacy for the Communist Party, but Mark Hilborne, a defense expert at King’s College London, noted that the difficulty for the West is “not knowing exactly what the Beijing authorities want to do,” especially given that rockets can be used for both military and civilian purposes, and that China is opaque in this regard, even to the point of “civil-military integration. There is a “civil-military integration” initiative, etc.
Todd Harrison, a space expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank, said China’s ability to cripple U.S. military, commercial and civilian satellites, whether low or high altitude, or to disrupt or mislead the U.S. satellite positioning system GPS, is a “real threat” to the U.S. military. “real threat.”
Cornell University scholar Lincoln Hines, on the other hand, said that some of China’s manned programs, which are extremely costly and extremely difficult tasks, are not effective approaches in scientific research, and therefore pushing up domestic prestige and shaping a soft power image may be a more important purpose than military expansion.
China is indeed taking actions to try to dispel international doubts, such as the National Space Administration (CNSA) inviting foreign scientists to study lunar samples collected by China and accepting foreign participation in experiments on the space station China is creating.
On the other hand, the Chinese official media disseminated an article in WeChat that China wants to break the “duopoly” of the United States and Russia in space, and that after the decommissioning of the international space station, other countries will have no choice but to use the Chinese space station for scientific experiments.
Recent Comments