The tense rivalry between China and the US will soon be out of this world.
Washington and Beijing are expected to launch spaceshots at Mars within days of each other in the next two weeks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
China is preparing to send its first mission to the red planet this week, launching a spacecraft on a seven-month trip to Mars.
It will orbit the planet for up to three months before sending a rover to conduct scientific experiments on the surface.
The US is planning its launch next Thursday that will land the Perseverance rover on the Martian surface.
The rover will deploy the Ingenuity Mars helicopter to attempt a controlled flight on the planet.
Mars over the next month is in alignment with Earth, allowing a trip using the least amount of fuel.
“The U.S. is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that China could overtake it in all manner of ways,” Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a US think tank, told the newspaper.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has put the space program at the center of the country’s “great rejuvenation” and urged its scientists to “achieve the early realization of the great dream of building a powerful space nation.”
The US and China have been at odds over trade issues, Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong protesters and its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a lengthy speech Thursday, Attorney General William Barr warned that the Chinese Communist Party has launched an “economic blitzkrieg” to topple the US from its perch as the world’s superpower, laying out the threat as the most important issue of this century and calling for the free world to join together in a “whole-of-society approach” against it.
“How the United States responds to this challenge will have historic implications and will determine whether the United States and its liberal democratic allies will continue to shape their own destiny or whether the CCP and its autocratic tributaries will control the future,” Barr said during a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich.
“The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg — an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower,” he continued.
Barr said China’s “Made in China 2025” initiative seeks to dominate high-tech industries like robotics and information technology and electric vehicles, which “poses a real threat to US technological leadership.”
