Space marathon

After 30 years, 135 missions, two disasters, and trillions of dollars spent, NASA's space shuttle program is winding to a close. The US launched its last manned mission into space earlier this month.

Meanwhile, China is charging forward - the emerging superpower of the 21st century has great plans for its space future. This year, a Chinese rocket will send a train car-sized module into orbit as part of plans to build a space station by 2020 when the International Space Station is scheduled to close. China hopes to put a man on the moon soon after.

No space race between US and China

Although there has been some speculation that a new space race could be brewing, experts are playing this down.

"There was a perception of a space race when both the US and China clearly had ambitions for a human spaceflight mission to the moon - China for the first time, the US as a return. That ceased when the US changed course," Joan Johnson-Freese, the chair of National Security Decision Making Department at the US Naval War College, told Deutsche Welle, adding that the US had no need to enter another space race since it had won against the Soviet Union.

Dean Cheng from the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC, agreed: "China's space race is about meeting China's goals. There is a huge disparity between what China is capable of and what the US has already accomplished."

There has been some talk of cooperation between the two countries, but the lack of transparency in China's military and space program has been a cause of concern among some US legislators.

Moreover, it is not so clear Beijing is that willing. "They are proceeding rather smoothly with their own plans and may not want to take on a potentially politically-touchy partner," explained Johnson-Freese, saying that there had been more concrete discussion about space cooperation between the US and India.

This is a view shared by Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at the Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, DC: "The end of the space shuttle program will likely have no immediate impact on China or India's space plans - which are driven by internal domestic needs and regional considerations rather than competing or cooperating with the United States."

A marathon between India and China

However, a different type of space race might be underway between India and China. For Johnson-Freeze, it is very clear that "though both deny it, they are competing for the geostrategic and economic prestige that comes with spaceflight accomplishments."

Cheng termed the competition between the two emerging superpowers as a marathon. "They are not racing with each other directly although they are keeping an eye on each other," he said.

"China is more likely to be able to sustain its program than India because of its centralized authoritarian government," explained Johnson-Freeze. She said that India was easing forward by "characterizing its program as part of security efforts to a population used to sacrifice for techno-nationalist goals."

For Pace, neither country is set on becoming a dominant space power in the very near future. He sees the People's Republic becoming a "peer" space power equivalent to Europe and Japan, unless the US dramatically reduced its space activities, which he thinks is "unlikely."

Author: Shivani Mathur
Editor: Anne Thomas