Is China’s progress in space technology a real threat to the US?

By the middle of the century, nuclear-powered Chinese shuttles will regularly ply interplanetary space, carrying workers between mining colonies on distant planets and asteroids.

If that, like much else published on the front page of the

People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, sounds like propaganda, remember that China has in barely two decades built up what is arguably the world’s second most advanced space programme, after United States’. US strategists warn that Chinese progress in space could soon threaten US military superiority globally.

Though it is important to remember something else, too. When it comes to the commercial future of outer space, China isn’t just competing against the US or Russian government. The real race is against nimble private companies like SpaceEx and Blue Origin – and there, China’s advantages are far less evident.

It’s true that by comparison to China, the US space programme appears to have stagnated. Americans haven’t left low-Earth orbit since the last moon landing in 1972. The International Space Station (ISS) – history’s most expensive scientific instrument – is underutilised, and presidential plans to return to the moon have faltered over the past two decades. Worse yet, Nasa’s current effort to build a new rocket and crew module to send Americans beyond Earth’s orbit is years late, over budget and testing the patience of key supporters in Congress.

Meanwhile, in 2003, China became just the third nation to launch a human into space on its own rocket. It has operated a small space station and engineered a robotic landing on the moon. Within its sights are even more ambitious goals, including a mission to retrieve and return lunar samples, as well as the construction and operation of a manned space station. If the US-led ISS isn’t replaced or extended beyond 2024 (there are no current plans to do so), the Chinese orbiter would be humanity’s sole space outpost.

Yet, thus far China’s centrally planned and military-centred space programme has only replicated achievements made decades ago by other national space programmes. The country appears to be following the template set by Nasa starting in the 1950s, whereby simple human space flight leads to the establishment of a lunar programme and an eventual space station. Even China’s boldest initiative – developing those nuclear rocket engines for interplanetary space shuttles – isn’t a new idea.

From 1955 to 1972, the US conducted its own nuclear rocket research, which Congress cancelled in 1973 over cost concerns.

Today, the most innovative research into space travel has shifted to the private sector, especially in the US. SpaceX’s commercial rockets have not only cut the cost of launching into Earth orbit, they are precursors to bigger rockets the company hopes will send humans to Mars before the end of the 2020s, long before China’s state-funded programme achieves the same.

Likewise, just last month, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin successfully tested a new rocket engine that could help establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface starting in 2020 – the year that China targets “parity” with US rocket technology. And privately held Bigelow Aerospace is planning to put an inflatable space habitat into orbit around the moon within five years.

Notably, these private-sector accomplishments are being made well ahead of Nasa’s long-term planning (insofar as the planning exists) and below Nasa’s budgets. According to one notorious Nasa study, it would have cost the agency between

The US space programme appears to have stagnated. Americans haven’t left low-Earth orbit since the moon landing in 1972

US$1.7 billion and $4bn to develop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX did it for $390 million.

Is there any reason to believe that the China National Space Administration is any more efficient than Nasa, the European Space Agency or other national space programmes? A lack of transparency makes it difficult to judge its effectiveness, especially with budgets.

But its development path hints at a conservative mindset, while its recent focus on unattainable benchmarks like matching US rocket technology by 2020 seems to be a sign of the kinds of political pressures that divert resources from their best possible use.

The Chinese government isn’t unaware that the private space sector has advantages over state-run space agencies. In recent years several companies, all with deep ties to China’s space and military authorities, have been allowed to set up operations. But China’s space agency is unlikely to tolerate much competition from these upstarts.

And already established private space companies such as SpaceX will be well past Earth orbit before either China’s government or its private companies make their first forays that far. In the race for space, the US may yet prevail.