By all accounts, the Chinese Chang’e 5 sample return mission to the moon has been a complete success. The space probe landed on the lunar surface, drilled and scooped up a quantity of soil and rock, and took off again. The success of the mission undertaken by the communist country has elicited some tired but often repeated suggestions that world peace could be created with joint space missions between China and the United States.
Louis Friedman, one of the co-founders of the Planetary Society, made the proposal in the pages of Space News.
“With the incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden wanting to bring American foreign policy back from isolation and confrontation, the space program could play a role by engaging China on the creation of an international lunar station, boosting our space program and giving us a benign foreign policy initiative.”
But Friedman is wrong on several levels. First of all, his assertion that the Trump administration’s foreign policy is one of isolation and confrontation is untrue. In space policy, NASA has engaged several nations to become partners in the Artemis return to the moon program, including Canada, the European Union, and Japan. Furthermore, the space agency has signed an agreement, called the Artemis Accords, with a number of nations defining the rules of space exploration, the better to foster peace and understanding on the high frontier.
The bigger problem with Friedman’s proposal to include China in a joint return to the moon is that the country is ruled by a regime that is evil on a scale not unlike that of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. China’s abuse of human rights, which includes the herding of an entire ethnic group, the Uighurs, into concentration camps, is an affront to the conscience of the world. Beijing’s drive for world domination, its lies about the COVID-19 pandemic, and its industrial espionage cyberwar campaign do not inspire confidence that it would be a reliable space partner.
Friedman and his compatriots at the Planetary Society have engaged in the “space as a bridge between enemies” foolishness before. Back in the 1980s, Friedman and the late Carl Sagan proposed a joint mission to Mars with the Soviet Union as a way to end Cold War tensions. President Ronald Reagan ignored the proposal, preferring a more tough-minded approach to dealing with the Soviets. Ironically, Russia only became a reliable space partner after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was brought on by the very policies that Friedman and Sagan had abhorred.
China’s and NASA’s approach to space exploration are quite incompatible for another reason. China is doing space in the traditional government-centric method. The Chang’e 5 is a product of the Chinese space agency, built, launched, and operated by Chinese government scientists and engineers. NASA used the same strategy from the time of Apollo up until recently.
Ironically, just as Chang’e 5 took off from the lunar surface with its treasure trove of moon dirt and rocks, NASA announced a new program that partners with commercial companies to collect lunar samples. The companies, Masten Space Systems, Lunar Outpost, iSpace Europe, and iSpace Japan, will collect lunar samples and store them on the moon’s surface for later retrieval. NASA will pay each company a small fee for the samples.
China, though officially still a communist country, has a private sector, which, according to Forbes, is the basis of its economic growth. Jeff Foust posits in a piece in the Space Review that the Chinese are attempting to develop their own commercial space sector. It is unclear how much commercial space will be integrated into China’s space program. So far, there are no Chinese equivalents of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
Could China ever become a space partner with the U.S. and thus the rest of the world? The country would have to undergo an incredible number of changes to evolve into a good international citizen, willing to deal with other countries honestly and treat its own citizens with respect and dignity. It needs to rely more on the commercial sector for its space program than is currently the case. Until that time, China must remain an adversary to the rest of the world, in space as well as on Earth.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration titled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
