China and US should cooperate on space exploration

There is every reason why China and the United States should work together in space. As the leading space powers, they are best placed to shape the rules that will be needed to cope with the ever-increasingly crowded cosmos. But as the launch of the first Chinese cargo freighter shows, cooperation is not even taking place at the most basic of levels. The ship, Tianzhou-1, will carry building materials and crew for the construction of China’s space station, an inevitability given a US ban on involvement in the world’s only such project.

US lawmakers banned China from the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011 to prevent espionage. Driven by rivalry and mistrust, their justification was to protect national interests. But space is expensive to explore and scientists have no need for politics; it gets in the way of their thirst for knowledge and discovery. That is why the US, the main builder and operator of the ISS, has already invited aboard astronauts and scientists from 15 countries.

Space is, after all, increasingly important to most facets of our lives. Services like communications, navigation and data transmission are reliant on satellites and with growing demand and expectations, they need to be ever-more sophisticated. Improved technology makes new industries possible, with space tourism the most imminent, but ideas like asteroid mining and laser communications are now perceived as being close at hand. Space, by some estimates, already accounts for US$330 billion of business that employs more than one million people and the research and experiments that can be carried out in space make for ever-greater possibilities.