China and India set the pace in space

Fifty years on from the first Moon landings, the human conquest of space has changed

First, today’s breakthroughs come more slowly than they used to. From the launch of Sputnik in October 1957 to Armstrong’s footprint in July 1969, any timeline of the original space race shows that, in those Cold War years, America and Russia registered new feats of engineering in space almost each month. The development of outer space is today a more leisurely business, even if there are some important advances. We’re in what a European Space Agency strategist has called a renaissance for lunar exploration, not a new international moon race that could mysteriously ‘define humanity’s future’.

Second, progress isn’t quite accompanied by the media blitz that NASA used to organise. Space, always a sphere for military activities, is more covert than ever: missions multiply, while exciting footage diminishes. In this greyer context, it’s easy to miss how China and India have now joined Russia as significant players in space.

America is rattled. In March, US vice president Mike Pence noted that Russia charges Washington $80m ‘every time an American astronaut travels to the International Space Station’. But his bigger point was that, ‘to seize the lunar strategic high ground (sic)’, China had become, with its Chang’e-4 lander and rover, the first nation to alight on the far side of the Moon. For Pence, then, the next people back on the Moon would have to be ‘American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil’, and they’d be there by 2024, not 2028, as NASA had previously planned. Where would they land? Where China’s had just upstaged America – at the Moon’s South Pole, a site, Pence now recognised, of ‘great scientific, economic, and strategic value’.

That isn’t the half of it. Pence was so exasperated by NASA’s usual regime of prevarication and delay, and with contractors Boeing, he hinted he could fall back on Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or some other private-sector space chancer to fulfil his accelerated five-year plan. By contrast, Beijing and New Delhi, in their different ways, are methodically reworking our ideas about what space can be. Defence considerations remain important to them, as to others; but as one aeronautics expert has said of Chang’e-4, it’s ‘a good way of showing soft power, with a little bit of hard’.

America’s National Security Strategy, then, only has things only half right when it observes that ‘communications and financial networks, military and intelligence systems, weather monitoring, navigation, and more’ all have what it describes as ‘components in the space domain’. For as the original space race showed, space has always been only partly about such workaday matters. A lot of it then, and a whole lot more of it now, is about political prestige.

China is a case in point. Chang’e-4 could hasten an unprecedented era of sub-30 MHz radio-astronomy, perhaps delivering new information about the early universe. Chang’e 4’s studies of ancient craters in the Moon’s giant (1500-mile) South Pole-Aitken basin may do the same for the early Moon and Earth.

Chang’e-4’s Lunar Micro Ecosystem tried but failed to grow cotton. But in scientific circles and beyond, probes like it will confer kudos on Beijing. Chang’e-5, for instance, will try to pick up samples from the surface of the Moon and return them to Earth. Then, next summer, China’s first visit to Mars is scheduled for launch, with the intention of putting a rover on the Red Planet.

As a German member of the Chang’e-4 team puts it: ‘European [space] missions are extremely slow, Americans are twice as fast, and the Chinese are another two to five times as fast as the Americans’. It’s true that China has suffered delays and setbacks with its Long March 5 heavy-lifting rocket. Yet there are hopes that, once more in the South-Pole Aitken Basin, its lunar robots will, between 2023 and 2027, go building an international research outpost with the help of a 3D printer using lunar materials, with a Chinese crew landing there in the 2030s. Even before that, the Chinese authorities’ roadmap contains a Jupiter mission by 2029; thereafter, it envisages a reusable carrier rocket by 2035, and a nuclear-powered space shuttle by 2040. And by 2050? China’s plans to put a commercial-scale solar power station into geosynchronous orbit – beaming down power to all those nations signing up to President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.

In the second, low-orbit prong of China’s space initiatives, its Space Station progresses, as do its efforts in hard-to-penetrate quantum communications by satellite, and in cheap satellite launches from flexible, stealthy naval platforms. Last year, for the first time, the country also performed more orbital launches than the US. And Smart Dragon-1, China’s first carrier rocket for commercial use, takes just six months to make and 24 hours to prepare for launch.

Meanwhile, India is moving ahead in space. Having detected water on the moon in 2008-9 and orbited Mars in 2014, it managed to launch, in 2017, a world-beating 104 satellites on a single mission (previous record: Russia, 37). Its own mission to the Moon’s south pole was cancelled at the eleventh hour on 15 July, but it will try again.

India is quick with projects, but its statist, ‘frugal’ budgets for space, unadorned by private-sector players in the manner of America, the EU and China, mean that missions are short, experiments few, and data acquisition limited. Nevertheless, the country intends to send a three-member team into space in 2022; and when, in March this year, New Delhi launched an anti-satellite missile at one of its own craft in space, the US military’s Strategic Command, normally an ally of India, was not best pleased.

We need not take seriously US alarms about anti-satellite (ASAT) warfare. China’s capabilities in ASAT technologies, and its incentive to deploy them, are limited. America protests that China and Russia are militarising space, but this is pretty rich, for the Pentagon itself is eyeing the use of commercial satellites for the command and control of US nuclear weapons.

Famously, Armstrong and Aldrin left a message on the moon – that Apollo 11 ‘came in peace for all mankind’. Never wholly peaceful in intent, today’s strolls in space, involving new players, aren’t really very gladiatorial.

They’re more an effort to impress.