No red space

This week, perhaps as early as tomorrow, the government of the People's Republic of China will make its first attempt to send a man into space in the Shenzhou 5 from Dongfeng Space City in the Gobi Desert. But it is just a small step in a larger plan. \nAccording to CNN's Joe Havely, the mission is seen as a stepping stone toward "the establishment of a Chinese space station(,) ... sending manned missions to the moon and eventually establishing a permanent Chinese lunar base" (CNN, Oct. 10). In a November 2000 White Paper, the PRC government makes clear that its interest in space is not purely altruistic: "The exploration and utilization of space resources shall meet a wide range of demands of economic construction, state security, science and technology development and social progress, and contribute to the strengthening of the comprehensive national strength."\nNote that "strength" bit.\nHaving grown up in front of the television set, like most Americans, I find that the upcoming Shenzhou 5 mission evokes two distinct sets of TV images.\nThe first is the grainy black-and-white footage of the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. Little guys in bulky white suits, bouncing around on the moon's gray rocky surface with the earth hanging above them, slightly goofy but still utterly amazing.\nThe second is footage from nearly 20 years later, June 4, 1989, of the PRC government unleashing columns of mechanized infantry against unarmed students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. While the actual number of casualties remains uncertain, a declassified State Department report, sent June 9 from the Beijing embassy to Washington, estimates that 2,600 were killed and around 7,000 wounded, with Chinese democracy among the dead.\nThus, from these two streams, a single question: are we going to sit back and let the world's most powerful autocracy overtake us in space?\nGranted, the PRC is only just approaching a feat that the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin achieved 42 years ago, and NASA is busy reforming after the Columbia Shuttle disaster. \nBut it's disturbing that the bold plans for human kind's progress toward the stars are not coming from visionary scientists supported by the democratic peoples of the world, but from a brutal oligarchy seeking influence abroad and legitimacy at home. Compare the PRC's lunar ambitions with this description of current NASA thinking by journalist Ralph Vartabedian: "In a departure from the ambitious goals it has set since the dawn of the Space Age, NASA wants a modest system that will break no new technological barriers, but instead reduce costs and improve safety -- perhaps by adding a crew escape system, for example" (Montreal Gazette, April 19). \nOh, wow.\nAs the European Space Agency is consumed with plinking communications satellites into orbit and the Russian Space Agency is one budget-cut away from building capsules out of paper maché, NASA is the world's best bet for ensuring that the night sky becomes no one's empire -- especially the empire of an undemocratic power that might decide space-based weapons are a nifty way to get Taiwan back. \nAs President John F. Kennedy said in the 1961 speech that launched the race to the moon: "Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share"