“After all, it was competition that got us to the moon. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” says John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and founder and former long-time director of the university’s Space Policy Institute.
“I think we’re going to see a mixture of cooperation and competition, probably between two blocs: one led by the U.S. Ever since, a potential repeal of the amendment has been a political football, tossed between hawkish factions eager to paint China as an emerging adversary in space and less combative advocates wishing to leverage the country’s meteoric rise in that area to benefit the U.S. Named after its mastermind, then representative Frank Wolf of Virginia, the Wolf Amendment prohibits NASA from using federal funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government. In 2011 Congress passed a law that included an add-on known as the Wolf Amendment. to search for common ground in shaping a more inclusive multination space agenda.įor now, however, restrictive legislation makes this far more easily said than done. But some experts suggest it might be time for the U.S.
space exploration objectives remains to be seen. What impact China’s space schedule, along with the country’s joint ventures with Russia, may have on U.S. And it is inviting foreign participation via the United Nations. The China Manned Space Agency has reportedly given provisional approval to stuff the station with more than 1,000 scientific experiments. By late next year, a rapid-fire launch schedule of more astronauts, supply ships and add-on modules should bring assembly of China’s orbital outpost to its conclusion. A core segment of the station is already aloft and operational, housing a three-person crew. In the meantime, nearer to Earth, China is rapidly constructing its “Heavenly Palace,” the multimodular Tiangong space station. Layered into the mix is China’s five-year plan for moon exploration, which, in a recently announced partnership with Russia, would lead to both countries jointly building an International Lunar Research Station that would be tended by human crews. remains the global leader in space by most metrics, but China is methodically advancing its own ambitious space agenda at a quickening pace, blueprinting and carrying out a succession of robotic interplanetary forays to destinations such as the asteroid belt and Jupiter, as well as a sample-return mission to Mars. and China, choose to engage with each other in the next few years. Will collaboration or competition define international space science and exploration in the 21st century? The answer could come down to how two spaceflight superpowers, the U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
