President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing
barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space
programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect
of a new space race with China.
Obama’s transition team is considering a collaboration
between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper
and ready sooner than the space agency’s planned launch
vehicle, which isn’t slated to fly until 2015, according
to people who’ve discussed the idea with the Obama team.
The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising
over China’s space ambitions because of what is perceived
as an eventual threat to U.S. defense satellites, the lofty
battlefield eyes of the military.
“The Obama administration will have all those issues
on the table,” said Neal Lane, who served as President
Bill Clinton’s science adviser and wrote recently that
Obama must make early decisions critical to retaining U.S.
space dominance. “The foreign affairs and national security
implications have to be considered.”
China, which destroyed one of its aging satellites in a surprise
missile test in 2007, is making strides in its spaceflight
program. The military-run effort carried out a first spacewalk
in September and aims to land a robotic rover on the moon
in 2012, with a human mission several years later.
A Level of Proficiency
“If China puts a man on the moon, that in itself isn’t
necessarily a threat to the U.S.,” said Dean Cheng,
a senior Asia analyst with CNA Corp., an Alexandria, Virginia-based
national-security research firm. “But it would suggest
that China had reached a level of proficiency in space comparable
to that of the United States.”
