In the West, ties between space and defense are strengthening

Bogdan Gogulan

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The RAND research group, whose aim is to look for ways to fix public policy issues in the United States and make communities safer, healthier and richer, published on June 24 a report called “China’s Growing Risk Tolerance in Space.” It was a detailed study, using open-source information from China’s defense sector. This included leader speeches, white papers, military training documents and writings on People’s Liberation Army strategy and rules. One key finding was that Chinese leaders perceived a global shift, with China rising to overtake the U.S. as the supreme world power. They also found that Chinese military leaders viewed the U.S. as a major threat and didn’t want to work with the U.S. to stop global crises from escalating.

It isn’t surprising, then, that the U.S. and China are closely monitoring what one another does in space. These countries, after all, are the contestants in the new Space Race: the competition to become the world’s dominant space power. It’s certainly true that China, despite being a space-faring nation for decades, has ramped up its defensive efforts in recent years, making major progress in a range of space-related areas such as satellite communication, navigation, earth observation, human space flight and space science. The recent and successful landing of a module on the dark side of the moon is testimony to that. And the U.S. has created the U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Space Defense Agency, or SDA – clear indications of how it understands the role of space in the world today.