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 Even as the Obama administration-appointed “Augustine Committee” was engaged in collective hand-wringing over the dismal future of NASA’s manned space program, the People’s Republic of China was preparing to begin work on its fourth space launch center, and is boldly pursuing plans for its first manned mission to the moon in 2017.
According to the Associated Press:
The space port on the southern island province of Hainan incorporates a launch site and mission control center for slinging the country's massive new rockets into space carrying satellites and components for a future space station and deep space exploration. The reports portrayed the center as a major stride forward for China's military-backed space program, which has launched three manned missions since 2003, including one last year that featured the country's first space walk.
China's future space ambitions include building an orbiting station and sending a mission to the moon, putting it in the forefront of the tightening Asian space race involving India, Japan and South Korea. China says its space program is purely for peaceful ends, although its military background and Beijing's development of anti-satellite weapons have prompted some to question that.
Anyone who is prepared to accept such purported "peaceful ends" at face value needs to have his head examined. As the AP writer observes, "However, cooperation in space with other countries has been inhibited by wariness over the program's close military ties. Highlighting that relationship, Chang Wanquan, a People's Liberation Army general who sits on the ruling Communist Party's powerful central military commission, joined other officers and technicians in Monday's groundbreaking ceremony, the reports said."
Unfortunately, the perilous nature of the situation is made all the more so by the effort by China and Russia to press for a treaty banning weapons in space — a treaty likely to resonate with the Obama administration, given the President’s stated support for such a ban. But such a treaty could only meaningfully restrict open, democratic societies from any such deployment; in point of fact, it is extreme difficulty even to define what would constitute a “space weapon,” when a paint chip can put a 4 mm crater in a space shuttle window and it is estimated that a 1 cm debris fragment could punch right through the hull of a spacecraft. When a $100 million satellite could be shot down by an orbital weapon not much more sophisticated that a shotgun shell with a really good targeting system, you’ve got an unbelievably complicated treaty verification problem. To put it bluntly: in space, any guided, powered object is a potential weapon within the constraints of its maneuvering capabilities, and given the track record of weapons inspectors operating on terra firma, any such treaty would have to largely rely on Chinese protestations of their “peaceful ends."
The Associated Press article explains that the new Chinese space center is far more valuably located than that nation’s previous launch facilities: “The Hainan center, located near the town of Wenchang and slated to go into use in 2013, is located at a latitude of about 19 degrees north, far closer to the equator than China's other bases in the its southwest and northern plains.”
This means China will now be able to launch satellites to geosynchronous orbit for a significantly lower cost than they could previously; given the importance of such orbits for communications, GPS and other satellites, China may be expected to compete for more and more such valuable orbits — whether for commercial or strategic interests.
As NASA’s manned space program is in danger of being curtailed, or turned into a showpiece for “international cooperation,” China plans to journey to the moon three years earlier than even the optimistic goals of the Bush’s administration’s Constellation program had projected. In fact, the United States may be winding down its involvement in the International Space Station at the very time that China lands its first crew on the lunar surface.
Given the administration’s aggressive pursuit of a radical domestic agenda, space has little to offer Mr. Obama but an opportunity to hold hands with the international community — and his czars are already planning plenty of those sorts of events in the administration’s commitment to advancing an agenda of environmental fanaticism.
The United States may simply concede any new space race before it even begins, and it seems unlikely that the European Space Agency could, or would, take up the challenge, either, leaving the field to China, Japan, India, and South Korea.
What naval power was for the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, and air power has been since the mid-twentieth century, the ability to project power in space will for the future. The lesson of Sputnik in 1957 was that it demonstrated to the world the age of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); the R-7 rocket that carried Sputnik to orbit was used in the first ICBM test two months before the first satellite was launched.
What is needed is a clear delineation of strategic space concerns, which are certainly an important element of national security, and manned missions which have little or no strategic significance and which may more appropriately be pursued by private interests. Arguably, defending American satellites and privately-owned American spacecraft or even space stations could be a mission akin to defending U.S.-flag vessels. In a new space race, the United States first needs to definite its national interests, and the steps which it is prepared to take to promote and aid Americans on the new frontier.
Rt. Rev. James Heiser has served as Pastor of Salem Lutheran Church in Malone, Texas, while maintaining his responsibilities as publisher of Repristination Press, which he established in 1993 to publish academic and popular theological books to serve the Lutheran Church. Heiser has also served since 2005 as the Dean of Missions for The Augustana Ministerium and in 2006 was called to serve as Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America (ELDoNA). An advocate of manned space exploration, Heiser serves on the Steering Committee of the Mars Society. His publications include two books; The Office of the Ministry in N. Hunnius' Epitome Credendorum (1996) and A Shining City on a Higher Hill: Christianity and the Next New World (2006), as well as dozens of journal articles and book reviews.
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