The Asian space race

Chinese astronauts may be grabbing all the headlines, but China is not the only Asian nation that can now consider itself to be a space power. Trefor Moss examines Asia's dash for space - and its military implications

When the United States put a man on the moon in July 1969, President Richard Nixon said it was the "greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation". Whether you agree probably depends - today more than ever - on which part of world you happen to be in.

Nearly 40 years on, it was China's turn to celebrate the glamour and glory of its own space programme as the latest Chinese mission, the Shenzhou 7, passed off without a hitch in September 2008.

Five years after China put its first man into space, this latest effort - hailed by President Hu Jintao as an "historical breakthrough" - sent three astronauts into space for 68 hours and included the successful execution of China's first space walk. Above all, it was testament to the enduring power of space to fire the imagination - and make grand political statements - that only weeks after the end of the Beijing Olympics the Chinese space walk had captivated the nation and caught the world's attention.

Images of a Chinese flag being waved 340 km above the surface of the Earth were widely interpreted as yet one more indication of the growth of Chinese power.

Yet more broadly, the story of Asia's rise, not just China's, is reflected in the achievements of space programmes across the continent. India and Japan have programmes that in many ways rival China's; tech-savvy South Korea is not all that far behind; and other Asian nations, including Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, have impressive satellite, if not launch, capabilities of their own, with even Vietnam launching its first communications satellite in April 2008.

Furthermore, Asia's assertive space ambitions are coinciding with an uncharacteristic period of self-doubt in the once pioneering US. The space shuttle, limping towards retirement in 2010, will not be replaced until 2015 at the earliest by the Ares I rocket and the Orion spacecraft, both of which NASA is still developing, prompting fears that the hiatus will give the likes of China - never mind Russia or the Europeans - a window of opportunity in which to overhaul the US dominance of space.

Apart from issues of prestige, this fear centres on the fact that the world's militaries, if not yet positioning weapons in space, have come to rely on space as an enabler for many of their core capabilities. The fear carries with it a question: does competition among the rising Asian powers and, perhaps more importantly, with an insecure US threaten a new space race that could snowball into space's militarisation?

In his book Failed States, Noam Chomsky portrays a military space race that has already begun, warning that "China and others may develop low-cost space weapons in reaction" to the US deploying its own space-based weaponry. While not going quite so far, Brigadier General John Hyten, director of requirements for the US Air Force's Space Command, impressed upon an audience at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in September that "space is a contested environment - though many people still don't believe this".

A now notorious escalation of that contest came in the form of China's anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test in January 2007. An ASAT missile is arguably not a space weapon, depending on your definition, and clearly not a space-based one.

However, it is hard not to see the ASAT as an offensive weapon aimed at crippling foreign countries' (in essence US) satellites; and the successful shootdown focused the minds of users of space-based systems, not least the world's militaries, on their considerable reliance on technologies, which are quite evidently vulnerable. 638 of 3480 words