The Second Space Race
Is PRC trying to duplicate America's Apollo Program or militarizing space?
China's space program lags far behind that of the U.S., of course. "They're basically recreating the Apollo missions 50 years on," says Joan Johnson-Freese, chair of the National Security Studies Department at the U.S. Naval War College and an expert on China's space development. "It's a tortoise-and-hare race. They're happy plodding along slowly and creating this perception of a space race."
But there may be more at stake than national honor. Some analysts say that China's attempts to access American space technology are less about boosting its space program than upgrading its military. China is already focusing on space as a potential battlefield. A recent Pentagon estimate of China's military capabilities said that China is investing heavily in anti-satellite weaponry. In January 2007, China demonstrated that it was able to destroy orbiting satellites when it brought down one its own weather satellites with a missile.
China clearly recognizes the significance of this capability. In 2005, a Chinese military officer wrote in the book Joint Space War Campaigns, put out by the National Defense University, that a "shock and awe strike" on satellites "will shake the structure of the opponent's operations system of organization and will create huge psychological impact on the opponent's policymakers." Such a strike could hypothetically allow China to counterbalance technologically superior U.S. forces, which rely heavily on satellites for battlefield data. China is still decades away from challenging the U.S. in space. But U.S. officials worry espionage may be bringing China a little closer to doing so here on Earth.
The charitable answer would be the former, if this Sino-Russian proposal for a "Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects" means anything good.
Washington has some fancy PR work to do, convincing the world, that non-WMD is necessary. Perhaps, the presidential candidates can offer a stance on a weapons ban?
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