China's Moon Quest Has U.S. Lawmakers Seeking New Space Race

China's Moon Quest Has U.S. Lawmakers Seeking New Space Race
April 20 (Bloomberg) -- Almost 37 years after Americans set foot on the moon, China's ambition to make the same trip is evoking rhetoric from U.S. lawmakers echoing the space race of the Cold War 1960s.

The lawmakers -- including Representative Frank Wolf, the Virginia Republican who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the U.S. space agency -- want President George W. Bush to spend more, faster, to get his new lunar program off the ground and retain U.S. space dominance. Bush's target of a U.S. return to the moon by 2018 may be too late, they say.

``If China beats us to the moon, we will have lost the space program,'' Wolf said in an interview.

China in 2003 became the third country, after the U.S. and Russia, to send a person into space aboard its own rocket. The communist country, fueled by the fastest-growing major economy, plans to send a robot to the moon to fetch lunar soil by 2017, Luo Ge, vice administrator of the China National Space Administration, said in Washington on April 3.

Space exploration ought to be on the agenda when Bush meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao today in Washington, said Representative Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican who co-founded the U.S.-China Working Group for legislators.

Kirk supports a plan to modify China's Shenzhou space capsule so it can dock with the International Space Station or U.S. craft. That way, either country can rescue the other's crew in an emergency, Kirk said in an interview.

Interest in Cooperation

``We have always been interested'' in space-station cooperation, Luo said in Washington.

While Bush's $16.8 billion fiscal year 2007 budget request for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would speed up U.S. efforts to return to the moon, lawmakers are pushing to accelerate the program still more. In December, Congress passed legislation that authorized up to $1.1 billion more than the Bush request.

The bill sought to shrink the gap between retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 and development of the crew exploration vehicle, the new spacecraft for moon trips. The CEV would be similar in design to the Apollo capsule of the 1960s, only three times bigger, for taking as many as four people to the moon.

Lockheed Martin Corp. and a team from Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. last year won contracts for preliminary designs of the vehicle.

``As it stands today, both China and Russia are closer to the moon than the U.S.,'' a bipartisan group of 36 lawmakers, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, wrote Bush in December.

Taxi Service

Even if the CEV comes on line by 2012, NASA's current goal, instead of the original 2014 target, the U.S. may still have to depend for two years on Russian or Chinese taxi service to and from the space station, said Vincent Sabathier and Ryan Faith, scholars at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Sabathier and Faith say the U.S. should embrace China's space program; others are more focused on competition.

``While we will work with other nations, we must remain the leader in space exploration and research,'' Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space, said April 17 in a statement responding to an inquiry from Bloomberg News. The Johnson Space Center, the home of Mission Control and astronaut training, is located in Texas.

Hutchison wants the CEV completed as close to 2010 as possible so there's no gap, said her spokesman, Chris Paulitz.

Skepticism

Some are skeptical of the effort to go back to the moon, which Bush says will become a base to prepare for an eventual human trip to Mars. NASA robotic rovers already operate on the Martian surface.

``I don't see any particular scientific reason to go back to the moon,'' said Douglas Osheroff, a professor at Stanford University and a winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics. ``If we want to beat the Chinese to the moon there's no scientific justification for the expenditure,'' he said. ``It's a political one.''

Wolf, who represents a northern Virginia district that includes aerospace contractors, last month asked NASA Administrator Michael Griffin to give Congress a report by the end of this month assessing China's space program. Wolf argues that it is more fitting for a democracy to lead the way in space than for China, which he describes as a violator of human rights.

Democratic Support

At least one Democrat, U.S. Representative Robert Cramer of Alabama, is also on the bandwagon. ``We cannot relinquish our nation's leadership in space,'' Cramer said after a March 30 House appropriations hearing on NASA. His district includes the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

NASA landed astronauts on the moon six times from 1969, when Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 took his famous ``giant leap for mankind,'' through 1972, when geologist Harrison Schmitt stepped off the lunar surface. The U.S. program then lost critical scientific know-how and momentum until the first space shuttle flight in 1981, Griffin has said.

Bush wants to retire the shuttle in 2010 after completion of the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, a 16-nation project.

Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei completed a 21-hour Earth orbit in October 2003. China's second manned mission was completed in October 2005 after two astronauts circled Earth for five days. The country has announced plans to launch its first lunar satellite next year and to build a space station by 2015.

John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said the idea of a new space race is ``being overblown.'' The Chinese, he said, are ``starting from well behind where we are, and they don't have ambitious goals for their human space-flight program.''

But Representative Tom Feeney, a Florida Republican, told a NASA hearing in February that he came away impressed after a visit to China's launch facility.

``These guys have skipped straight to the space equivalent of HDTV, plasma and LCD TV sets,'' he said.



To contact the reporters on this story:
Judy Mathewson in Washington at [email protected]
Chris Dolmetsch in New York at [email protected].
Last Updated: April 19, 2006 18:49 EDT