China\'s emergence as a new space power

Since becoming an economic superpower, China's space programme is showing an explosive growth. In the last decade, China's aspiration to expand its space programme, has taken it from a not very known entity to an up-and-comer in space exploration. China is considered a major player now. In its quest to conquer the outer space, China apparently does not want to remain behind the traditional space powers such as the USA and Russia. So far China has been behind them as it didn't send its first astronaut to space until 2003. Until now, China hugely benefited from the Russian technologies as they would buy used Russian rockets and make these usable for its own purpose by reverse-engineering.
With new Chinese innovations, its budget has increased by 10 per cent a year for the last few years. With the military overseeing space programme with a selected group of highly trained, young, ambitious and keen engineers and scientists, China has developed its own agenda in lunar exploration while NASA scientists are focused on Mars.
According to many experts, the moon is the key to understanding how to live and work in space and explore the other planets in the solar system.
This past Thursday, China's national defence chief Liu Jizhong announced that the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry is planning to land the Chang'e-4 probe by landing on the far side of the moon in 2018.  So far no other country has landed on the dark side of the moon. This announcement is a testimony to China's space programme which is growing very fast.
Such a bold move shows that China is going to be one of the top space powers by taking its space programme through major overhauls. It is determined to move forward with remarkable discoveries of its own. Among all the other newly emerged countries such as Brazil, India, South Korea and Iran who are trying to make a stance in exploring the space, China stands out as it has been in competition with Russia and the United States from the middle of the 20th century. Though China has been behind the USA and Russia in space exploration, it remained persistent in making its own mark in exploring the unknown planets.
China has not been as successful as Russia and the USA in space. The first Chinese satellite went up in 1970, much later than its two 'rivals'. Internal power struggle within the communist society took its toll on any civilian space aspirations; the People's Liberation Army still called the shots. As its economy modernised through reforms, the goal of reaching space developed, and     eventually flourished. Space was seen as the ultimate frontier to gain national prestige, power and even economic leverage over its two rivals. The pace has accelerated only in the last two decades. In 2013, China landed a rover named Jade Rabbit on the moon, and managed to return an unmanned spacecraft from orbiting the moon. It now has an ambitious goal of landing on the dark side of the moon by 2018. It is building a space station named Tiangong 2, followed by a manned crew to contact with the lab. The main module will launch in 2018 and the project will be finished by 2022. By that time NASA will have decommissioned its international space station.
In a separate mission, the Chinese space programme plans on landing a man on the moon by 2022. It is building a new launching site in Wenchang, closer to the equator, to be able to send bigger payloads, and thus being more competitive. According to a January 10, 2015 article in the Economist, China will hopefully be able to launch the Long March 9, one of the world's highest capacity rockets, by 2030.
With an annual space budget of only $2.0 billion, China can hardly compete with the USA where NASA budget was $18b last year, still considered by many a shoe-string budget. (Currency conversion makes a one-to-one comparison difficult.) The annual Russian budget was $8.6b for comparison. The US budget is only 0.5 per cent of the total federal budget, far smaller than the 4.5 per cent from its Apollo days.
It is well known that during the building of the international space station, China was blocked from participating by Russia and the USA. Even today, Chinese scientists need a special waiver to work at any NASA facility. Clearly there is a military aspect to this space competition. There is no doubt that nations are fighting for the control of space. It is hard to predict whether China is pursuing a space war strategy. Does it want to end the asymmetry with the US vis-a-vis space budget and capability? Landing on the dark side of the moon is one such effort with a push from the Chinese military.
The Russian and US space budgets are falling. It is a little ironic considering they were the pioneers of space exploration. It is not clear if they will try to supersede China by taking more adventurous endeavours when public support is in decline.
Forty-seven years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, this new aspiration of China to land on its dark side is perhaps not trivial. Some in the USA are cheering on China for doing something that hasn't been done before. The largest crater in the solar system is on the dark side of the moon, and exposes the mantle which may shed light on the composition in detail after Chang'e-4 lands. This may reveal hitherto unknown elements.
Will China be able to stick to its timeline of 2018? If so, will it increase China's status? Will NASA, the European Space Agency and India, who are thinking of launching a Mars mission by 2030, think this has not been that great an achievement by the Chinese? It remains to be seen if competition and mean spiritedness will prevail or whether the scientific community will rise above it and share the glory.
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