US losing space dominance

U.S. Finds It's Getting Crowded Out There

Dominance in Space Slips as Other Nations Step Up Efforts

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 9, 2008; A01

China plans to conduct its first spacewalk in October. The European
Space Agency is building a roving robot to land on Mars. India
recently launched a record 10 satellites into space on a single rocket.

Space, like Earth below, is globalizing. And as it does, America's
long-held superiority in exploring, exploiting and commercializing
"the final frontier" is slipping away, many experts believe.

Although the United States remains dominant in most space-related
fields -- and owns half the military satellites currently orbiting
Earth -- experts say the nation's superiority is diminishing, and many
other nations are expanding their civilian and commercial space
capabilities at a far faster pace.

"We spent many tens of billions of dollars during the Apollo era to
purchase a commanding lead in space over all nations on Earth," said
NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, who said his agency's budget is
down by 20 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 1992.

"We've been living off the fruit of that purchase for 40 years and
have not . . . chosen to invest at a level that would preserve that
commanding lead."

In a recent in-depth study of international space competitiveness, the
technology consulting firm Futron of Bethesda found that the
globalizing of space is unfolding more broadly and quickly than most
Americans realize. "Systemic and competitive forces threaten U.S.
space leadership," company president Joseph Fuller Jr. concluded.

Six separate nations and the European Space Agency are now capable of
sending sophisticated satellites and spacecraft into orbit -- and more
are on the way. New rockets, satellites and spacecraft are being
planned to carry Chinese, Russian, European and Indian astronauts to
the moon, to turn Israel into a center for launching minuscule
"nanosatellites," and to allow Japan and the Europeans to explore the
solar system and beyond with unmanned probes as sophisticated as NASA's.

While the United States has been making incremental progress in space,
its global rivals have been taking the giant steps that once defined NASA:

Following China's lead, India has announced ambitious plans for a
manned space program, and in November the European Union will probably
approve a proposal to collaborate on a manned space effort with
Russia. Russia will soon launch rockets from a base in South America
under an agreement with the European company Arianespace, whose main
launch facility is in Kourou, French Guiana.

Japan and China both have satellites circling the moon, and India
and Russia are also working on lunar orbiters. NASA will launch a
lunar reconnaissance mission this year, but many analysts believe the
Chinese will be the first to return astronauts to the moon.

The United States is largely out of the business of launching
satellites for other nations, something the Russians, Indians, Chinese
and Arianespace do regularly. Their clients include Nigeria,
Singapore, Brazil, Israel and others. The 17-nation European Space
Agency (ESA) and China are also cooperating on commercial ventures,
including a rival to the U.S. space-based Global Positioning System.

South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil have plans to quickly develop their
space programs and possibly become low-cost satellite launchers. South
Korea and Brazil are both developing homegrown rocket and
satellite-making capacities.

This explosion in international space capabilities is recent, largely
taking place since the turn of the century. While the origins of
Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Israeli and European space efforts go back
several decades, their capability to pull off highly technical feats
-- sending humans into orbit, circling Mars and the moon with unmanned
spacecraft, landing on an asteroid and visiting a comet -- are all new
developments.

A Different Space Race
In contrast to the Cold War space race between the United States and
the former Soviet Union, the global competition today is being driven
by national pride, newly earned wealth, a growing cadre of highly
educated men and women, and the confidence that achievements in space
will bring substantial soft power as well as military benefits. The
planet-wide eagerness to join the space-faring club is palpable.

China has sent men into space twice in the past five years and plans
another manned mission in October. More than any other country besides
the United States, experts say, China has decided that space
exploration, and its commercial and military purposes, are as
important as the seas once were to the British empire and air power
was to the United States.

The Chinese space program began in the 1970s, but it was not until
2003 that astronaut Yang Liwei was blasted into space in a Shenzhou 5
spacecraft, making China one of only three nations to send men into space.

"The Chinese have a carefully thought-out human spaceflight program
that will take them up to parity with the United States and Russia,"
Griffin said. "They're investing to make China a strategic world power
second to none -- not so much to become a grand military power, but
because deals and advantage flow to world leaders."

Meanwhile, other nations are pushing to increase their space budgets.
Ministers from the European Space Agency nations will vote in November
on a costly plan to begin a human space program. David Southwood,
ESA's director for science, said human space travel has broad support
across the continent, and European astronauts who have flown to the
space station on U.S. and Russian spacecraft are "extremely popular
people" in their home nations. "It seems highly unlikely that Europe
as a whole will opt out of putting humans into space," he said.

NASA and the U.S. space effort, meanwhile, have been in something of a
slump.

The space shuttle is still the most sophisticated space vehicle ever
built, and orbiting observatories such as the Hubble space telescope
and its in-development successor, the James Webb space telescope,
remain unmatched. But the combination of the 2003 Columbia disaster,
the upcoming five-year "gap" when NASA will have no American
spacecraft that can reach the space station, and the widely held
belief that NASA lacks the funding to accomplish its goals, have
together made the U.S. effort appear less than robust.

The tone of a recent workshop of space experts brought together by the
respected National Research Council was described in a subsequent
report as "surprisingly sober, with frequent expressions of
discouragement, disappointment, and apprehension about the future of
the U.S. civil space program."

Uncertainty over the fate of President Bush's ambitious "vision" of a
manned moon-Mars mission, announced with great fanfare in 2004, is
emblematic. The program was approved by Congress, but the
administration's refusal to significantly increase spending to build a
new generation of spacecraft has slowed development while leading to
angry complaints that NASA is cannibalizing promising unmanned science
missions to pay for the moon-Mars effort.

NASA's Griffin has told worried members of Congress that additional
funds could move up the delivery date of the new-generation spacecraft
from 2015 to 2013. The White House has rejected Senate efforts to
provide the money.

Although NASA's annual funding of $17 billion is large by civilian
space agency standards, it constitutes less than 0.6 percent of the
federal budget and is believed to be less than half of the amount
spent on national security space programs. According to the Futron
report, a considerably higher percentage of U.S. space funding goes
into military hardware and systems than in any other nation.

At the same time, the enthusiasm for space ventures voiced by
Europeans and Asians contrasts with America's lukewarm public response
to the moon-Mars mission. In its assessment, Futron listed the most
significant U.S. space weakness as "limited public interest in space
activity."

The cost of manned space exploration, which requires expensive
measures to sustain and protect astronauts in the cold emptiness of
space, is a particular target.

"The manned space program served a purpose during the Apollo times,
but it just doesn't anymore," says Robert Parks, a University of
Maryland physics professor who writes about NASA and space. The
reason: "Human beings haven't changed much in 160,000 years," he said,
"but robots get better by the day."

Satellite Launches Fall
The study by Futron, which consults for public clients such as NASA
and the Defense Department, as well as the private space industry,
also reported that the United States is losing its dominance in
orbital launches and satellites built. In 2007, 53 American-built
satellites were launched -- about 50 percent of the total. In 1998,
121 new U.S. satellites went into orbit.

In two areas, the space prowess of the United States still dominates.
Its private space industry earned 75 percent of the worldwide
corporate space revenue, and the U.S. military has as many satellites
as all other nations combined.

But that, too, is changing. Russia has increased its military space
spending considerably since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In May,
Japan's parliament authorized the use of outer space for defense
purposes, signaling increased spending on rockets and spy satellites.
And China's military is building a wide range of capabilities in
space, a commander of U.S. space forces said last month. Last year,
China tested its ground-based anti-satellite technology by destroying
an orbiting weather satellite -- a feat that left behind a cloud of
dangerous space debris and considerable ill will.

Ironically, efforts to deny space technology to potential enemies have
hampered American cooperation with other nations and have limited
sales of U.S.-made hardware.

Concerned about Chinese use of space technology for military purposes,
Congress ramped up restrictions on rocket and satellite sales, and
placed them under the cumbersome International Traffic in Arms
Regulations (ITAR). In addition, sales of potentially "dual use"
technology have to be approved the State Department rather than the
Commerce Department.

The result has been a surge of rocket and satellite production abroad
and the creation of foreign-made satellites that use only homegrown
components to avoid complex U.S. restrictions under ITAR and the Iran
Nonproliferation Act. That law, passed in 2000, tightened a ban on
direct or indirect sales of advanced technology to Iran (especially by
Russia). As a result, a number of foreign governments are buying
European satellites and paying the Chinese, Indian and other space
programs to launch them.

"Some of these companies moved ahead in some areas where, I'm sorry to
say, we are no longer the world leaders," Griffin said.

Joan Johnson-Freese, a space and national security expert at the Naval
War College in Rhode Island, said the United States has been so
determined to maintain military space dominance that it is losing
ground in commercial space uses and space exploration. "We're giving
up our civilian space leadership, which many of us think will have
huge strategic implications," she said.

"Other nations are falling over each other to work together in space;
they want to share the costs and the risks," she added. "Because of
the dual-use issue, we really don't want to globalize."