Hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface, there are currently two space stations circling the globe: the International Space Station — completed over a decade ago through a collaboration between Europe, the U.S., Russia, Canada and Japan — and Tiangong, due for completion this year by one nation: China.
Tiangong, which means ‘heavenly palace,’ is only one part of China’s effort in space. In the last two years, it has launched its first independent mission to another planet, completed a global satellite navigation system, and collected samples from the lunar surface.
These landmark achievements signal China’s arrival as a major player in space — a development which has set off alarm bells in the U.S. about the two countries’ geopolitical competition spreading to yet another frontier. And while the majority of experts agree that the U.S. is still dominant in most space technologies and applications, as China becomes increasingly active in space, questions are mounting over whether Beijing and Washington can agree on basic rules for them to operate peacefully in the cosmos.
China wants as a matter of status to be a great space power. Space is this domain of the future in which no great power can be idle.
Alanna Krolikowski, a Professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology
“There are concerns in the U.S. with the growth and direction of China’s space capabilities. It is part of an overall concern that the Western world has about China’s advances,” says Nicholas Eftimiades, a former intelligence officer who is now a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “We need to work with allies, and [countries that are] not allies like China, to develop rules of the road [and] to develop acceptable practices in space. We need to have an understanding on how to deal with these flashpoints.”
Space competition has implications for commercial success, military advancement, and national prestige — all areas China is keen to pursue. Satellites providing navigational data, for example, have both commercial applications for companies like Google and military uses such as for battlefield positioning. Ambitious projects like lunar landings have for decades been important as projections of national power.
“When people talk about a ‘space race,’ it conjures up the race to go to the moon between the U.S and the Soviet Union [in the 1960s],” says Kevin Pollpeter, an expert on China’s space program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a Navy-funded think tank. “But [the race between the U.S. and China] will occur over a longer period of time, across a larger groups of things.”
China has ambitious plans to extend its footprint in space: In a white paper released early this year, its State Council Information Office revealed that it aims to send a crewed mission to the moon, collect samples from Mars, improve launching technology, as well as plans to work with allies to create a lunar research center. Meanwhile, China’s commercial space industry is blossoming; as Liu Baiqi, the founder of Galactic Energy Aerospace Technology, a leading Chinese private space launch company, said in a recent interview, “The sustainable development of spaceflight does not have to depend entirely on endless government spending. Commercial spaceflight is inevitable.”
Despite China’s progress, the U.S. has the advantage of a significant head start in space; NASA is still renowned as the best space program in the world and companies like SpaceX, a private spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk, are at the forefront of extra-terrestrial innovation. Experts, though, warn against American complacency.
“The U.S. is still far more capable than China,” says Alanna Krolikowski, a Missouri University Science and Technology professor and expert on U.S.-China relations in strategic high-technology sectors. “[The gap] is shrinking, there is no question. Chinese progress is swift and steady. China wants as a matter of status to be a great space power. Space is this domain of the future in which no great power can be idle.”
NASA itself has referred to China’s advances as a key reason for maintaining and increasing its funding — the agency had a $23 billion budget last year. In a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing convened to discuss NASA’s 2022 budget held last year, its administrator Bill Nelson at one point held up a picture of China’s Zhurong Mars rover before the lawmakers, saying, “I want you to see this.” China’s spending on its space activities is not publicly available.
Yet as the race for leadership in space intensifies and attracts more money, many analysts say that the U.S. and China simultaneously need to cooperate on creating some operating guidelines — albeit NASA is effectively prohibited from using federal funds to directly collaborate with China due to a 2011 law known as the Wolf Amendment.
It’s time the U.S. woke up and smelled the coffee. The world is no longer interested in its divisive, hegemonic schemes; instead, it is crying out for cooperation in every field, from fighting climate change, containing the COVID-19 pandemic to exploring outer space.
China Daily
As more nations and companies launch satellites, for example, the issue of managing space debris and avoiding space traffic has become pressing. In 2021, the then-incomplete Chinese space station had two close calls with SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and had to maneuver to avoid collision, according to the Chinese government. Afterwards, China filed a complaint with the U.N. describing the incidents, which “constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the China Space Station.”
The complaint referenced the Outer Space Treaty, a U.N. accord signed in 1967 which created the basis of space law. But in many ways the incident underscored the limitations of the existing regulations – the treaty lays out broad principles but does not include specific rules for how space traffic should be managed. In the 2021 space whitepaper, China specifically references strengthening space traffic management and debris monitoring as key future goals.
“What happens if a Chinese commercial satellite hits a U.S. satellite?” asks R. Lincoln Hines, an assistant professor at the U.S. Air War College. “The U.S. and China have hardly any interaction in space, and the U.S. has little info about the Chinese space sector.”
Another potential future sticking point is regulation around how to explore and mine resources in space. In 2020, the U.S. launched the Artemis Accords, which seeks to create basic guidelines around space exploration, including lunar resource mining, and already boasts twenty signatories.
China and Russia are not a part of the agreement, and have made plans for their own lunar research station to support scientific exploration as an alternative. China generally argues that space treaties should go through the U.N., instead of an American-led process, echoing its approach in other areas of international relations. “It’s time the U.S. woke up and smelled the coffee,” a Chinese state media article declared this year. “The world is no longer interested in its divisive, hegemonic schemes; instead, it is crying out for cooperation in every field, from fighting climate change, containing the COVID-19 pandemic to exploring outer space.”
Tensions heightened further last week when NASA’s Nelson criticized China’s approach to space exploration in an interview, and China’s foreign ministry spokesperson fired back, saying he “lashed out at China in disregard of facts.”
As Blaine Curcio, an expert on the Chinese commercial space sector and founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, sums up the risky landscape: “There are not many well defined rules,” he says, “and there is not a lot of good will to go on.”

Katrina Northrop is a journalist based in Washington D.C. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Providence Journal, and SupChina. @NorthropKatrina