Before the International Space Station was launched into orbit in 1998, the US signed a document with several other countries agreeing to the peaceful use of the orbital laboratory. The agreement included Russia, Japan, Canada and 11 European countries. China was left out of the plan.
Nearly a decade later, China expressed interest in joining the people aboard the space station. The European Space Agency, along with South Korea, has expressed support for the addition. The final decision was ultimately opposed by the United States.
“I think you have to understand that Congress gave us very clear direction in 2011.” Deputy Administrator of NASA said Pam Melroy. “Any bilateral cooperation with China had to be certified as not sharing information that would give China an advantage.”
In 2011, Congress included a directive in a spending bill to ban cooperation between NASA and China when it comes to certain scientific research, including in space. Lawmakers argued that the Chinese program was secretive and too closely tied to the Chinese military.
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China has become a new threat and has started a new space race. (Sterlab)
“I think there’s no doubt that they are an economic competitor, and they are also a geopolitical competitor for leadership,” Melroy said.
China began to develop its own space station. It launched and decommissioned a few short-term space laboratories between 2011 and 2018. In 2011, it launched the first part of its Tiangong space station, which translates to Heavenly Palace.
“We are now laser-focused on China. China is a threat. We are in a new one space race,” said President of International and Space Stations at Voyager Space Jeffrey Manber.
Voyager is one of three companies contracted by NASA working to develop a new space station. Voyager says it is on track to launch its Starlab in 2028. There is some concern that NASA will face budget cuts. If there are delays at the companies designing the next space stations, NASA will retire the space station without a replacement ready to go.
Melroy insists the agency won’t let China be the sole operator of an orbiting space station, but the storyline resonates with that of the Space Shuttle program.
The American-made Space Shuttle was the world’s first reusable aircraft. It launched like a rocket and landed like an airplane. In 2004, then-President George W. Bush announced a new space initiative, including retiring the shuttle by 2010 and conducting the first crewed mission with a new spacecraft by 2014.
NASA completes strategy for human presence in space
“The Crew Exploration Vehicle will be able to transport astronauts and scientists to the space station after the shuttle is decommissioned,” Bush said in 2004.
The government was considering several contractors to develop the vehicle under the constellation program. In the following years, program delays and financing problems were leading Obama administration to remove the program from the 2011 budget.
“Pursuing this new strategy will require that we rethink the old strategy. In part, this is because the old strategy, including the Constellation program, in many ways failed to deliver on its promise,” then-President Barack Obama said in April 2010.
The government has instead allocated more than $6 billion to support commercial companies that build spacecraft. A year later the shuttle program came to an end. American-made missiles were still unavailable. The US was forced to rely on Russia for further space travel.
“These were difficult times. I think it was the right decision. The time of the shuttle was over. We had to make a strategic investment in our own industry to develop the capability to take people to space,” Melroy said . “There were a lot of people who thought we had canceled the space program.”
NASA would finally have one American-made rocket that could take people to the space station, nine years after the shuttle’s retirement. It was a six-year delay from Bush’s initial projection. The 2020 SpaceX launch was also the first of a commercial rocket on US soil.
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China has created a new competition for space exploration. (Arkisys)
As NASA faces the same prospect again, officials insist they have a different strategy for competing in space with China.
“I think it’s different in the sense that we’re still the leader. We intend to remain the leader. We intend to remain the partner of choice. We work very well with our international partners, and they want to continue working with us. Melroy said.
Only Chinese Taikonauts have visited the Tiangong Space Station. The country has expressed its openness to receiving astronauts from other countries. Beijing has intensified cooperation with Sweden, Russia and Italy. In recent months, China’s first international payload was launched on a Chinese commercial rocket. It included Oman’s first satellite, which is equipped with artificial intelligence for urban planning, forestry monitoring and disaster management.
If China becomes the only permanent presence in space, international partners could be forced to rely on the Taikonauts for long-term space needs. low Earth orbit. Commercial companies could also be forced to do the same.
“We have to be somewhat careful about technology transfer and how we can actually connect with global companies to make sure that we don’t give away the things that are associated with that,” said Dave Barnhart, CEO of Arkisys.
California-based Arkisys is working on a robotic service port that companies can use while in orbit.
“We can provide the freight, the supplies, the robot manipulation capability, the fuel and everything needed to support a maintenance architecture,” Barnhart said.
Barnhart added that the port could help preserve it the USA competitive in space if a commercial station is not ready for use when the space station is decommissioned. Although the port would be robotic and have no humans on board, it would still give the US some form of permanent presence.
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“We’re actually hoping that we’ll be a bridge between when the (space station) is decommissioned and when the new commercial space stations are up there,” Barnhart said. “We’re autonomous, we can move much faster. We can allow different orbital transfer vehicles to bring in cargo, to bring in fuel, to bring in new payloads.”
