In New Moon Race, Russian Crash Shows the Only U.S. Rival Is China
livemint.comHONG KONG—A new Cold War-style competition has put the moon back at the center of global space ambitions, but the U.S. has a new chief rival. More nations and companies are venturing into space, crowding the calendar with planned robotic landings for lunar research.
But, like the scramble to plant boots on the moon in the 1960s, the race to establish a base on the lunar surface boils down to a contest between the world’s superpowers. Only this time it is Beijing, not Moscow, that Washington is up against. China has been aggressively ramping up its space program since the U.S.
barred it from working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 2011 on security grounds. After a string of triumphs in recent years, it set its sights on starting to build a permanent moon base around the end of the decade—reviving U.S. lunar ambitions, with echoes of America’s all-out effort to beat the Soviet Union to the moon.
Only American astronauts have stepped on the moon’s surface—and for decades there had been little interest in repeating the feat. Exploration efforts instead focused on robotic missions into deeper space. Two years ago, China said it would join Russia in building a moon base and invited other interested nations to take part.
But decades after the Soviet Union beat the world into space, Russia is a waning space power. Last month, a Russian lander crashed on the country’s first mission to the moon since Luna-24 in 1976, another setback for Moscow’s effort to again become a force in space exploration. Yury Borisov, the director general of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said “the invaluable experience that our predecessors gained in the 1960s-1970s was almost lost" because of a disconnect between
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