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Dean Cheng is a senior advisor to the China program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent non-partisan institute founded by Congress, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. A researcher focused on Chinese military doctrine and its space program, he previously worked in the China division at the federally-funded Center for Naval Analyses, later joining the Heritage Foundation as a senior research fellow. Cheng has testified before the U.S. House and Senate committees on Chinese security, and is the author of Cyber Dragon, a book about China’s information and cyber activities. In this lightly edited Q&A, we discussed U.S.-China space competition, the strengths and weaknesses of China’s space industrial complex, and the promise of manufacturing in space. Cheng’s answers reflect his own opinions, and do not reflect the views of USIP or PIPS.

Q: Let’s talk about U.S.-China competition in space. How would you characterize the current situation? Is it a new Space Race?

A: It is not a space race in the 1957 to 1969 sense. Neither side is firing off rockets every few weeks: a lot of the basic science has been resolved. What is going on is that each country has its own schedule and plan. But in the broader sense of the geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China, space is an important forum, and we see this with the American-led Artemis effort and the Chinese-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). These are two competing multinational programs where both sides are trying to attract international partnerships and support. 

Space Race 1.0 was just us [the U.S.] and the Soviets. In what is arguably space race 2.0, it is a much more complex picture than simply us and the Chinese racing to go to the Moon, or Mars. Now there is also the commercial factor. Even though the Chinese would like to claim that Space X is essentially part of the United States, it is actually a private company. Elon Musk is not part of the U.S. government. 

Space Race 2.0 also includes other countries, not necessarily racing the U.S. and China, but wanting to enter the space business and competing further back. For example, India is a growing space power. It does not have all the capabilities of the United States, but it is trying to compete with China to some extent. Japan is also trying to compete with China to some extent, and South Korea is arguably trying to compete with Japan. We also have the European Space Agency; although it is not clear whether they’re racing. Then we have the Russians, whose space effort is stymied by an aging space workforce, budgetary starvation, and sanctions. They remain a space player, if only because they’re part of the International Space Station.

Given how complicated this new competition in space is, how can we tell who is winning?

It depends on what you mean by winning. Does getting people back onto the Moon constitute winning? Does building a base on the Moon constitute winning? Does landing people on Mars constitute winning? There are many different facets to this competition. Determining who is winning probably means thinking about all of these pieces, and that’s separate and distinct from messaging, which is to say you might land somewhere first or do something first, but if you don’t really emphasize that in your messaging, what exactly have you won? 

…the Chinese, in their military doctrinal writings, have made very clear that to win future “informationized local wars”, you have to establish information dominance. One of the paths to information dominance is to dominate space…

China pays attention not just to achieving things in space, but making sure that they then use that as part of the broader message. They say: “Look at our technology. Look at what we are able to achieve. Other countries either want to join us, or do not want to offend us. Other countries think about buying our technology, want to partner with us, or at least to stay on our good side”. The U.S. has gotten out of the habit of thinking in those terms.

Could you say a little bit more about the ILRS and Artemis programs.

Vice President Pence said in 2019 that the United States was hoping to put American boots on the Moon by 2024. It is October 2024, and it seems safe to say that the U.S. is not going to be able to. However, in the process, the U.S. also said it wanted to make this an international effort. Thus was born the Artemis Accords, which is an informal set of guidelines about how to treat the Moon, consistent with the Outer Space Treaty [signed in 1967]. It includes, for example, that no one should claim sovereignty, but that there need to be some rules of the road, some standards and norms. Partners will be part of a technology-sharing effort for the Artemis missions that eventually will involve a lunar Gateway station [a space station around the moon] that will send spacecraft down to the Moon and back. The ultimate objective is a long-term human presence on the Moon.

ILRS is a Sino-Russian effort to establish a lunar research station. It has about a dozen countries that are typically more aligned with China and Russia. Since the Ukraine war, the Russian role has moved into the background, because people don’t tend to want to be associated with Russia very much. 

Unfortunately, at this point, it seems like the Chinese are likely to put boots on the Moon before the Americans can go back. Once that happens, it is an interesting question whether countries may leave Artemis and join ILRS, or sign up for both. Politically, if the Chinese make it to the Moon first, what that is going to be a signal of, at least, according to Chinese propaganda, is: “the Americans went to the Moon first in 1969 and now they cannot go back. We came from behind, and we’re there now”. That has implications for who will have access to the best spot for water on the Moon. It also matters for determining who will set the rules of the road. If China also deploys a lunar position navigation system into lunar orbit, does that set the standard for things like timekeeping? That would then have huge implications for things like navigation on the Moon.

Where else is this complicated space race happening other than the Moon?

In low Earth orbit. There is a lot of interest there for a few reasons. One, having lots of satellites in low Earth orbit means that any spot on Earth is constantly under observation, which is great for internet connectivity. So if I want to have nice, smooth video, like what we’re enjoying right now, it helps to have a lot of satellites providing redundant coverage. [This is to ensure there is always enough satellite bandwidth available for demand and in case of satellite failures]. It is also great for reconnaissance and military satellites to keep watch over things.

Elon Musk’s Starlink is talking about a proliferated low Earth orbit (pLEO) mega constellation. That means thousands of satellites providing satellite internet. It is global, so if you have a terminal, you can hook into the internet very quickly, because it bounces off thousands of satellites. 

China is now working on three pLEO mega-constellations, and they are pretty explicit. Firstly, they want to drive Elon Musk out of business. Secondly, if we think of bandwidth, frequencies, and spectra on the electromagnetic scale, these are all finite resources. If China can put up more constellations, it can then access more of these limited resources, which then effectively doesn’t block out SpaceX, but keeps India, the EU, and Japan from putting up mega constellations. The Chinese are clearly aiming to both pressure Starlink and to keep other players at bay. 

A third area of competition is more traditionally military: space and counter-space weapons. The Chinese tested an anti-satellite missile in 2007, one of the worst debris-generating events in space history. Since then, the Chinese, in their military doctrinal writings, have made very clear that to win future “informationized local wars”, you have to establish information dominance. One of the paths to information dominance is to dominate space to keep an adversary from using space, as this will constrain their ability to gather and move information. Because of the realities of geography, China’s main security concerns are close to its borders. It doesn’t need satellites to monitor Taiwan or to dominate the South China Sea. For the United States, we fight far away from the homeland. Without satellites, we would have trouble coordinating carrier groups, for example. 

You mentioned Starlink — why is it banned in China?

The Chinese have only three points of interconnectivity with the global Internet, which is one of the reasons why the Great Firewall of China can succeed. The Great Firewall is one of the means by which the Chinese government strives to make sure that the Chinese population is only given the information that is government-approved. The problem is that, to borrow a phrase that Churchill had about Hitler’s Europe, there is no roof. This is to say that Starlink, in theory, could allow Chinese citizens to access the global Internet by bypassing the three choke points. This would obviously be unwelcome from the Chinese Communist Party’s perspective. So the Chinese are working very hard to make sure that Musk never sells Starlink terminals into China. 

Coming back to the U.S.-China space competition, are there any guardrails that could limit dangerous escalation? 

The space domain is governed by about four major treaties, all of which are really part of one big treaty, the Outer Space Treaty signed in 1967. It says there is no sovereignty [in space], meaning no nation can lay claim to a celestial body. So in theory, nobody can go claim the Moon or Mars. 

From the Outer Space Treaty also came things like the Space Liability Convention, which says that if there are accidents in space, you know there are procedures for determining who is liable. It says that the launching nation is responsible for its satellites, which raises some interesting questions. If Elon Musk launches satellites from Texas and there is an accident, it is the U.S. government, technically not SpaceX, that is responsible. 

It also gives us the rule that astronauts are envoys of all mankind, and should never be treated as enemy combatants. If they come down in your territory, you are obliged to help them get back to their home. As you can see, this is not all that many laws, and treaties, and there isn’t that much of a body of Space Law, most of which has to do with commerce and contract law. So, in terms of guardrails, there is very little. 

There’s also very little arms control in space. We have seen this with the Russians, who have tested an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon destructively, meaning it generated debris. Now there are claims that the Russians are thinking of deploying nuclear ASATs. So even the Outer Space Treaty doesn’t seem to really be a guardrail. 

The Chinese work on five-year plans… CASC knows how many rockets and satellites it needs. It is all very stable. You don’t have new parliaments or new presidents suddenly saying: “I don’t think we need to buy these” or “Can you change the design?”.

The good news here is that this is Russia and not China. So far, there’s no reporting that I’ve seen that the Chinese are deploying a nuclear weapon in space, unlike claims that the Russians are, and neither we nor the Chinese, nor the Russians or the Indians have ever thought about shooting somebody else’s satellite down. So there is, at this point, the sense that satellites are national territory or national objects. You wouldn’t sink somebody else’s destroyer and think you could just get away with it. So far, nobody has taken a shot at anybody else’s satellite just to sort of see what might happen.

Left: ICEYE SAR satellites on a SpaceX launch vehicle. Right: The Long March 2D rocket containing 41 satellites. Credit: IC EYE via Wikimedia Commons, Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology

Let’s talk about China’s space industry. How central is the state, and what are the pros and cons of its role?

The Chinese space-industrial complex has two pieces. The first is the state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and those are primarily two large companies: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). Each is about 100-110,000 people, which is huge, and these companies only do aerospace-related things: rockets, satellites, launch-related technologies of ground facility equipment, and rail cars. 

The good thing about these companies and the overall Chinese economic system is stability. The Chinese work on five-year plans. They say: “In this five year plan, we are going to launch, let’s say, 100 satellites a year for 500 launches”. That means that CASC knows how many rockets and satellites it needs. It is all very stable. You don’t have new parliaments or new presidents suddenly saying: “I don’t think we need to buy these” or “Can you change the design?”. When you look at all the various rockets that have been talked about to replace a space shuttle, every new president commissioned a new study and changed things, and that meant a lot of wasted money. 

And so the Chinese system is in some ways more efficient. But on the other hand, no company of 100-110,000 people — which does not have to pay attention to the bottom line — is very innovative. Innovation is the product of people trying to figure out how to do something better, and the thing that drives innovation, more than almost anything else, is the desire to make money. So that’s one of the reasons why, beginning in 2014-2015, the Chinese opened up their space industrial sector to private enterprise. And while many of these companies aren’t really private — they’re offshoots of CASC or CASIC — a number of them actually are, with shareholders, venture capital investment, etc. Some have generated innovation: things like methane-powered rockets, reusable rockets and launch systems. The reason for this is that private companies get to keep any money they save. If they save money, they do more launches for the same budget. 

Now, at the end of the day, in China, all these companies have a Party committee. Their technology is, if the Party says so, going to be accessible to the state-owned enterprises. But right now, in peacetime, companies are out there, competing with each other, striving to innovate, and we’re starting to see them produce some level of competition with SpaceX.

Moving now to the U.S., what did you make of the recent Starship launch and “chopstick” landing? [On 13th October, SpaceX’s Starship launched. Its rocket booster was successfully caught in mid-air in the two arms of a launch tower.]

It was technologically amazing: landing a skyscraper so precisely. 

Now consider the following: when the Falcon 9 [another SpaceX rocket] first landed on its tail [in 2015] that was in defiance of many engineers’ opinions that this was simply not going to work. What we are seeing is SpaceX accomplishing this steady chain of really hard things. 

Second, Starship is the biggest rocket ever made. If this is a reusable rocket, it can be mass-produced. Then we are talking about a revolution in terms of cost-to-orbit, which, in turn, has distinct implications for creating what might be termed a virtuous cycle. When it costs a huge amount to go into orbit, everything has to work, because nobody can afford failure. When it becomes more like flying from New York to Boston, then all of a sudden, if I miss this flight, I’ll go on the next flight. If there’s a flight every other week, all of a sudden, I’m more willing to experiment. That pushes technological innovation. So, assuming that Starship is reliable, we are talking about finally making space travel more commonplace, to the point where it is like airliners taking off from JFK. 

NASA makes increasing use of the private sector, and you see that in its current plan to go to the Moon. Why is that? 

Because at the end of the day, the private sector is the one that’s innovating and driving down costs. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is currently estimated to cost $4 billion per launch. Even a Starship will cost a fraction of that. $4 billion is half the cost of an aircraft carrier for one launch; that is simply unsustainable. 

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, March 17, 2022 (left) and August 16, 2022 (right). Credit: NASA Kennedy via Flickr

And if we are competing with China to send crews to the Moon, to establish a longer-term presence on the Moon, you’re going to need to send a bunch of missions to the Moon, if only with water and fuel and food and oxygen and all those sorts of things. So $4 billion is unaffordable. The other thing about Starship is that it puts a lot of other countries’ space systems in jeopardy. Many will be unimaginably expensive compared with Starship. 

Finally, I wanted to ask about other discussions around space that most of the public is not aware of. One area is manufacturing in space, which I was not aware was a possibility. What would be the benefit of that?

There are a lot of dreams about manufacturing in space: trying to take advantage of microgravity and the vacuum of space to try and come up with new drugs, new materials, and new microchips. 

In microgravity, certain things are cheaper or just made more possible. For example, it might be possible to make single-molecule layers for wafers, and in theory, it might be easier in microgravity. I’m not a pharmacologist, but people keep talking about the possibility of manufacturing certain drugs in space. For some reason, you cannot get those chemical reactions or combinations on Earth. But so far they have not come up with new things,  in part because it still costs a lot to put things into orbit. Also, by the time you’re done shipping stuff up into space, doing whatever you’re going to do, and bringing it back, and given the limited size of places like the International Space Station, you’re making tiny amounts of stuff and it is not cost-effective. If you started having more space stations or maybe something on the Moon, in theory, you could start approaching economic returns on investment. We are not there yet.

One interesting area is the possibility of 3D printing in space — I believe there have been some experiments with that on the ISS. Where that could be interesting is if you started making things on a satellite. Say if you made a small satellite onboard a bigger satellite, you could, in theory, produce things that would be very hard to keep track of. And now we’re talking about weapons again. You could print a very small thing and give it some kind of kick that would send it at a fairly high speed towards another satellite. Because satellites are fragile things, it wouldn’t take much to destroy one, or “mission kill” its ability to operate even if you haven’t blown it into smithereens. That’s something that a lot of people are worried about because it is hard to observe and track.

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