US must wake up to the threat of China's space programme

China may land astronauts on the Moon before NASA returns there, which analysts say would represent a major geopolitical victory for Beijing. Two camps exist in the Western space community: one dismisses the significance of a new Moon race, while the other warns that space dominance has become a defining front in US-China rivalry in the 21st century. The piece argues Washington has yet to fully grasp the scale of the challenge.

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There are generally two schools of thought in the Western space community when it comes to the prospect of China landing humans on the Moon in the next few years and very possibly beating NASA and the United States in its efforts to return astronauts there.

Many people will ask what the big deal is. After all, NASA won the space race to the Moon nearly six decades ago, when Apollo 11 landed there. That it took so long for anyone else to follow speaks to the magnitude of the US achievement, they might say.

But others have a starkly different opinion. A dominant storyline of the 21st century has been the economic and geopolitical rise of China, and what was once a unipolar world now has two large nations vying for supremacy across a number of fronts. One is space. If China can land humans on the Moon before the United States returns, it will represent a huge geopolitical win. From a propaganda standpoint, it will allow China to declare that it has not just caught up to the United States but surpassed it as this century's superpower.

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US must wake up to the threat of China's space programme

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