On July 23, at precisely 12:41 P.M. Beijing time, with the planets aligned in favorable ways, China launched its ambitious Mars probe mission from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on Hainan Island, a blast-off fueled by the country’s biggest “Long March” rocket, the CZ5. 

The unmanned spacecraft, dubbed Tianwen-1 — or “quest for heavenly truth” — is a multi-functional vessel that will make a six-month-long journey to Mars of more than 300 million miles. When it finally reaches the red planet, a coordinated system of heat shields, parachutes and rockets will deploy from an orbiter and enter the ultra-thin atmosphere of Mars. A white bell-shaped capsule will then help a lander, the size of a small car, touch down softly on its crusty, red surface. A ramp will unfurl, and a 530-pound rover will roll down to the rocky surface below. Outfitted with high-resolution cameras and sensors, the solar-powered rover will then explore the terrain of the planet that most resembles our own.

It’s a feat that no other nation has even attempted to do, all at once.

China says the mission will help unlock the mysteries of a planet that has long captured the world’s imagination, and spawned science fiction novels like the H.G. Wells classic, The War of the Worlds. The mission will build on discoveries from earlier Mars probes that found evidence of a watery surface in the planet’s past, lending credence to the notion that some form of life may once have existed on the Martian surface. Using ground-penetrating radar, China’s probe will map the planet’s substructure from orbit, seek pockets of water underground with the rover, and study its magnetic field.

If successful, the Mars mission would cement China’s status as a spacefaring power, one of just three nations, along with the United States and Russia, to venture deep into space and achieve a soft landing on Mars — one of the most difficult operations in space flight. It would also announce to the world that a nation that has earned a fortune during the past two decades with low-skilled labor and little technology to call its own, now has the capability to develop one of the world’s most sophisticated machines, allegedly without the use of American chips or technology.

“It’s always dangerous to underestimate your competitor, whether you’re making potato chips, automobiles or spacecraft,” says Dean Cheng, a senior fellow and space analyst focusing on China at the Heritage Foundation. “We should definitely not assume that China is somehow always playing catchup.”

China has already notched some remarkable achievements in space flight. It has sent humans — Taikonauts — into orbit on six occasions, only the third nation to do so independently. It has launched more rockets into orbit in the past few years than any country, and built its own satellite navigation system, called Beidou, to compete with America’s global positioning system, or GPS, and the European Union’s rival Galileo. And last year, as part of its Shenzhou missions, it landed a spacecraft called the Chang’e 4 on the far side of the moon — something no other nation had ever done.

Though the U.S. remains the world’s pre-eminent space power, China’s thunderous steps can now be heard. In Washington, the nation’s capital, there are growing concerns that the U.S. is falling behind in space exploration and that China could challenge America in what is known as the final frontier. A unified and powerful Chinese Communist Party, observers warn, could build platforms in outer space to harvest new resources, mine asteroids, deploy sophisticated surveillance systems and dominate the huge, commercial satellite business using state subsidies.

In a report to Congress last November, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission also warned that Beijing views space as a critical vulnerability for the U.S. military, which relies on satellites and navigation systems to manage drones, missile guidance, war ships and surveillance capabilities. The report called on Congress to “develop a strategy that ensures the U.S. remains the pre-eminent space power in the face of growing competition from China and Russia,” and to help the U.S. forge alliances with allies and partners in space, and assume a growing role in space governance institutions, lest the U.S. lose its leading position in outer space.

In January 2019, the Pentagon released its own report, “Challenges to Security in Space,” with even more dire language, asserting that China and Russia now view space as critical to modern warfare and are developing “counterspace” capabilities, with cyber weapons and directed energy strikes capable of tracking, jamming and destroying satellites and the communications networks of the U.S. military.

The idea that China will command the frontiers of space has already seeped into the American psyche. In the best-selling book The Martian, an American astronaut (played by Matt Damon in Ridley Scott’s 2016 film adaptation) finds himself stranded on Mars, with no way to return to Earth. NASA receives an offer of assistance from China’s hulking space program, which comes to the rescue, firing off a rocket that can provide a Hollywood ending by saving America’s doomed Mars mission.

Of course, that type of cooperation seems unlikely today. Since 2011, Congress has effectively barred NASA from working with China over long-standing concerns that its space program is controlled by the Chinese military and could exploit joint exercises to advance the country’s military development and put U.S. security interests at risk. The Trump administration has toughened that position with increasingly hostile reports on China’s military buildup and even expanded America’s export blacklist to include more firms associated with China’s space program.

“The Obama Administration was keen to work with China,” says space policy analyst Marcia S. Smith. “The Wolf amendment ended many, but not all, of those plans. Now NASA must jump through a number of hoops in terms of congressional notification to win approval of specific, low level cooperation.”

For China, though, the Mars mission is a source of great pride in what has been accomplished in the past two decades, just as America’s Apollo missions to land American on the moon were for the U.S. beginning in July 1969. China has done something truly remarkable, and hit long-range goals and targets, and the Chinese authorities say they used indigenous, home-grown technology, to travel deep into space and move into the upper ranks of spacefaring nations.

Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders believe the program is a sign of China’s “great rejuvenation,” the re-emergence of a nation that still feels the wounds of being overpowered by superior technology and military force at the close of the Qing Dynasty, in the early years of the 20th century, and then, more brutally, after Japan’s invasion and occupation during the 1930s and 1940s.

FROM RICKSHAWS TO ROCKETS

Four months before he was arrested, in May 1950, the famous rocket scientist Qian Xuesen inspired a Popular Mechanics cover story called “Rocket to the Moon: No Longer a Fantastic Dream.” Qian had been touting the feasibility of a moon rocket for years and, as a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (now part of NASA), had the insight to know what was, or was not, within America’s reach. 

“We have enough knowledge, including a practical power plant, to build a moon rocket now,” Qian told the magazine. 

At the time, Qian was something of an American hero. Born in Shanghai in 1911, he had won a scholarship to MIT in 1935, gained recognition as a superstar professor at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), and during World War II worked on the Manhattan Project for the U.S. Army — America’s secret project to develop an atomic bomb. 

But on September 7, 1950, Immigration and Naturalization Service agents showed up at his home in Pasadena, Calif., and arrested him. Qian, while humiliated, was hardly surprised. In an era defined by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s paranoia over Communists, fear that Qian — a Chinese national — was secretly spying for China (and therefore Russia) had already led the FBI to strip him of his security clearance. After his arrest, he was detained for 15 days and then placed under house arrest for five years — presumably the length of time required for any top secret information he knew to become dated. In 1955, he and his family were deported. 

There is no conclusive evidence that Qian was spying or even affiliated with the Communist Party (he vehemently denied both allegations) but the U.S. government’s sudden change of heart towards Qian, a man once trusted with the nation’s most sensitive secrets, severely bruised the brilliant scientist’s ego. Deporting him, former Navy Secretary Dan Kimball later said, was the stupidest thing the United States ever did.

Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party could hardly believe its good fortune. The country welcomed Qian home with open arms. In October 1956, Premier Zhou Enlai announced the establishment of the Fifth Research Institute of the Ministry of National Defense, with Qian as its director. Though it was a far cry from the advanced facilities and resources Qian was used to at JPL, he set about making the institute’s few brick buildings in Beijing into a center for ballistic rocketry research. 

Up to that point, China’s rocket technology was limited, but it had been helped by the Soviet Union’s transfer of technology captured from the Germans during World War II, including the V2 rocket. In the early 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split brought Beijing’s cooperation with Moscow to a halt, but by then China had received a tremendous boost from Qian. As part of the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” project, he was tasked with developing nuclear weapons, an intercontinental ballistic missile, and launching a satellite. China developed an atomic bomb by 1964 and then a hydrogen bomb by 1967 — a record in fission-to-fusion technology that even beat out western powers like France.

The immense social and economic upheaval of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 severely hampered China’s space plans, with Beijing nixing Shuguang, a human spaceflight project analogous to NASA’s Gemini spacecraft. But Qian kept working. Along with a handful of other scientists handpicked by Zhou and approved by Chairman Mao, he was spared the Cultural Revolution’s persecution of intellectuals. (Yao Tongbin, another missile expert working on “Two Bombs, One Satellite,” was beaten to death in 1968.) By April 24, 1970, Qian cemented his status as the father of China’s space program when he helped China launch the Long March 1 rocket, which successfully placed a satellite (the Dongfang Hong-1, or “The East is Red-1”) into orbit — a feat only four other countries had achieved.

“China’s space program bore fruit not just in the Cold War but after the Sino-Soviet split, when China had no friends, no allies, no partners, and had to do pretty much everything on its own,” says Cheng, the analyst at the Heritage Foundation. “We kind of forget how isolated China was once upon a time.”

China’s isolation started to change with the passing of Mao in 1976 and the eventual emergence of Deng Xiaoping as leader. By the 1980s and 1990s, a number of American satellites even hitched rides on Chinese launchers. But allegations of technology transfer and espionage involving U.S. corporations cut U.S.-China cooperation short. In 1999, a congressional document known as the “Cox Report” detailed China’s covert operations dating back to the late ‘70s and led to a number of barriers that severely limited interactions between the two space programs. 

By then, however, China had proven adept at reverse-engineering technologies. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, China, likely through illicit channels, acquired Ukraine’s RD-120 refined kerosene and liquid oxygen rocket engines, which produce world-class levels of thrust. Before long, China had set up rocket propulsion centers in Xi’an, in north China, and had developed its own version of the rocket engine, the YF-100.

“China’s main strategy is to employ reverse engineering of foreign technologies,” says Alla Hurska, an analyst at the Jamestown Foundation. “It is not really a secret that most Chinese space and military technologies come from former USSR countries, in particular from Ukraine and Russia.”

The YF-100 created new possibilities for China, allowing the development of powerful rockets fundamental to the nation’s space plans. By the turn of the century, Qian’s humble lab had grown to be just one part of the massive state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), which employs around 180,000 people at institutes and facilities across the country. (NASA, for comparison, has 17,000 employees.)

By 2003, China became only the third nation to independently send an astronaut — called a taikonaut in China — into space. The frail, 92-year-old Qian reportedly watched from his hospital bed as the second generation Long March rocket lifted off. In Thread of the Silkworm, Iris Chang’s definitive book about Qian’s life, Chang notes the incredible technological changes that occurred in China in the twentieth century. Qian, she wrote, “was born into a nation of rickshaws and left it a nation of rockets within the span of a single lifetime.” 

Qian died in 2009, but the space program he built in China continues, whether purposefully or not, to honor his fascination with the moon. China has multiple lunar missions and explorations currently underway, including plans to establish a robotic, and perhaps someday human, base on the moon’s south pole. Permanent facilities on the moon, experts say, would serve as a jumping off point for further space exploration as well as play an important role in China’s plans for space-based solar power, a nascent, but promising technology that transmits energy via microwaves. (Skeptics like Brian Weeden, a space expert at the Secure World Foundation, caution, however, that solar power may be a bit like “flying cars or fusion power” — very difficult to make work.) 

Also in Qian’s spirit, China’s space program is not letting the United States’s hostility stop it. In 2021, it plans to launch its own space station, since it was blocked from joining the International Space Station by the United States. The orbital outpost is to operate for at least ten years, providing invaluable experience in human spaceflight and development. 

China’s plans in the immediate future also include developing fully-reusable launch vehicles, or spaceplanes, and even a nuclear-powered shuttle. China’s long-range goals, according to the “space transportation roadmap” that CASC unveiled in 2017, are “large-scale space resource exploration and development, asteroid mining and space-based solar power plants,” all of which would be not only lucrative but could theoretically solve national resource and energy security concerns.

“The big expansion in the Chinese space program took place from 1992, when the government decided that there should be a manned space program,” says Brian Harvey, author of numerous books on space, including China in Space: The Great Leap Forward (2019). “This was followed by key decisions over the following number of years to build a space station and start a lunar program, Chang’e.”

THE NEW ‘STAR WARS’?

Today, China’s burgeoning space program boasts four sites that can send its Long March rockets into orbit: the Jiuquan launch site, in the Gobi desert; one in the southwest, in Sichuan Province; another in Shanxi Province, in the north; and its newest launch site, capable of bigger payloads and closer to the equator, on the island of Hainan, which is where the Mars probe mission blasted off from on July 23.

It’s all part of a mammoth space program. The operation has a secret budget and dozens of affiliated companies and research institutes, many with military ties. A mission control center operates from Beijing. A training facility for Taikonauts is believed to be north of the capital city. And a Mars simulation test site was built in the northwest, in Qinghai Province, a location chosen because its barren, rocky landscape resembles that of the red planet.

The program, analysts say, has an impressive record of meeting long-range planning targets, even goals set a decade or more in advance. Missions are now scheduled for China’s spacecrafts to rocket to the Moon, Mars and even Jupiter, in the year 2029. 

“If you look at the history of space exploration, both human and robotic, it’s very clear that China is driven by much more long-term thinking than we are in the U.S.,” says James W. Head 3d, a professor at Brown University who trained Apollo astronauts in geology. “We talk about decadal surveys in the U.S., and it’s good to be thinking in terms of ten-year timelines, but China is looking way longer term. It’s all part of a long-term plan.”

Moreover, perhaps to better compete with the U.S., which has allowed private space entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos (Blue Moon) and Elon Musk (SpaceX) to participate in national missions, China opened up its commercial space industry in 2014, making way for private companies and startups, like iSpace, the first Chinese firm to send a rocket into orbit. (See The Wire’s related article on China’s commercial space industry and its startups.)

Beijing is also pushing to improve multilateral ties, by inviting other nations to participate in its space program, including any member of the United Nations. Analysts have dubbed it “China’s Silk Road in the sky,” and say the country could use the partnerships to bolster its fledgling commercial businesses, by launching satellites and managing communications and surveillance, initially for developing nations but eventually for wealthier countries — a strategy that the Chinese company Huawei followed in building up its telecom business to compete with the likes of Ericsson and Nokia in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In July, Brig. Gen. Steven J. Butow, and several other U.S. officers, published a lengthy report titled, “State of the Space Industrial Base 2020,” saying that among the major challenges the U.S. faced was China’s rise as a space power. “A key component of China’s strategy,” the report said, “is to displace the U.S. as the leading power in space and lure U.S. allies and partners away from U.S.-led space initiatives, through its Belt and Road initiative and plans for an Earth Moon Economic Zone.”

Of course, China’s space development — like its stepped up naval operations in the South China Sea and its sprawling infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative — have raised suspicions and concerns in the West that China’s gains in space could have dramatic and unforeseen consequences for geopolitics and cybersecurity, and perhaps accelerate moves to weaponize outer space.

Those concerns are understandable. In recent years, China has built battleships, and has transformed itself into an A.I.-powered surveillance state that is already exporting its tools overseas. It’s also, along with Russia, one of the world’s most notorious cyber attackers. And its close alignment with Russia and Iran — and increasingly hostile relations with the U.S. — signal that space could become a new battlefield.

Even if relations with Beijing were cordial, U.S. military leaders years ago began to recognize that the country’s ground forces and naval operations rely on an extensive array of low earth orbit satellites, and that China’s ability to jam or shoot down American satellites would be a threat.

Indeed, in a series of essays and studies published in recent years, a growing number of current and former U.S. military officers have issued what sounds like a call to arms. The works suggest a fear that if the U.S. does not prepare for battles in space, it could find itself outmaneuvered by Russia, China and other nations seeking to build up their space capabilities.

The Trump administration responded by announcing the establishment of the first independent branch of the armed forces since 1947: the U.S. Space Force (USSF). The White House also pressed NASA to speed up its plan to send astronauts back to the moon, now proposed for 2024, and to build the Lunar Gateway, an orbital space station and cited as a major step toward crewed operations in deep space. 

“Make no mistake about it: We’re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,” Vice President Mike Pence said in a speech delivered in March 2019. “Last December, China became the first nation to land on the far side of the Moon and revealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world’s pre-eminent spacefaring nation.”

America’s worries trace back to the 1990s, when allegations surfaced that the Chinese engaging in intellectual property theft from companies that were American space contractors. The U.S. responded by banning NASA from cooperating with China’s space program, and barring U.S. companies from exporting goods with space or military applications to China, including satellite technology. The U.S. also excluded China from the International Space Station, which Russia is involved in, and the forthcoming Lunar Gateway.

The U.S. has long worried that China is transferring the technology and know-how to the PLA, or People’s Liberation Army, which is closely aligned with its space program. (In 2015, China established the PLA Strategic Support Force, to tie its space development with its armed forces.)

U.S. concerns are embedded in federal legislation. In its 2020 Appropriations Act, the U.S. Congress continues to explicitly restrict NASA from dealing with China’s space program, saying its funding may not be used “to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement, or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or  contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company unless such activities are specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of enactment of this Act.”

Make no mistake about it: We’re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence

Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on China’s space program who teaches at the Naval War College, says these long-standing practices may have actually aided Beijing’s space development. “After China was shut out of the I.S.S. [International Space Station] by the U.S. — and they had very much wanted to be involved — [China] took to developing its own program, and eventually decided it was better and easier to not have to deal with U.S. policies, changing goals and politics,” she says, adding: “China also does not bifurcate is space efforts, civil and military, since most of the technology is dual use and it makes economic sense not to.”

Of course, one of the concerns now is that a “space race” — or space rivalry — could turn ugly, as a growing number of countries consider plans for space tourism, efforts to mine and harvest rare minerals and asteroids, and manage the growing number of small and large satellites in low-earth orbit, as well as the orbital debris floating above the earth, at high speeds. Last year, the Economist magazine called for the world to develop “a system of laws to govern the heavens” — an update to the vague Outer Space Treaty of 1967, that declared space “the province of all mankind.”

Cooperation and space governance must be undertaken soon, analysts say, partly because it may already be too late to constrain China’s highly developed space program, and efforts by Russia and other nations to upgrade their space programs.

Whether or not the U.S. likes it, there is mounting evidence that American companies, universities, venture capital firms and even the nation’s leading stock exchanges, have aided China’s rapid advances in technology and economic development, and as a result, contributed to its growing space and satellite capabilities.  

Now, with America’s relations with China entering an increasingly dark phase, the country’s law enforcement agencies are raiding university offices and labs and investigating scientists with ties to China. The White House and members of Congress are even pushing ahead with proposals and executive orders that would restrict Chinese graduate students from studying in the U.S., amid concerns about their possible ties to the PLA or the likelihood they could be involved in intellectual property theft. 

And that, scholars warn, could result in a replay of the McCarthy era and the targeting of American citizens who are ethnically Chinese. The scrutiny could play out in Silicon Valley, or at America’s most prestigious scientific labs — focusing on brilliant thinkers like Qian Xuesen, who ran the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, before being deported and helping China build its own missile and space program.

“China landed on the far side of the moon which nobody else has done,” says Cheng, the expert at the Heritage Foundation. “Those who somehow think that China is doomed to be behind are very poor students of world history, not just about China but nations in general.”

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