Few seek to partner with them, so Russia, PRC draw closer in space
APOGEE STAFF
Despite their shared roots in Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have clashed through the decades over issues including borders and how to advance communism. But even as each nation presses its own vision for regional and world order, they are pulling together in their determination to eclipse the United States in global influence. They have come to recognize that one path toward this goal takes them through outer space.
The result is a modern-day space race reminiscent of the 1950s and 1960s, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to get spacecraft and people into orbit and to the moon. National pride remains a strong motivator, as it was back then, but more than bragging rights are at stake today. Satellites in orbit help project power on Earth, guiding warfighters and tracking an adversary’s movements. And there are many potential partners because more than 45 nations now have space programs, according to the website of the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs. The United States is building lasting coalitions in space, first through the International Space Station (ISS) — a partnership from which Russia had threatened to withdraw, perhaps to join the PRC version — and now through the Artemis Accords for exploring the moon, Mars and beyond. What’s more, the U.S. military has reached agreements with more than 30 nations to share situational awareness data in space.
Russia and the PRC, meanwhile, have turned to each other. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signed a joint statement in February 2022 affirming earlier declarations that their two countries enjoy a friendship “without limits.” Soon afterward, Russia invaded Ukraine, drawing international condemnation and additional sanctions on top of those already imposed after it seized the Crimean Peninsula eight years earlier. This has cost Russia access on the global market to the latest in space technology. Still, in February 2022, Russia showcased its deepening ties with the PRC during a high-level meeting in Moscow.
“The only other country they could really go to, in space, was China,” said Kevin Pollpeter, a China authority and senior researcher with CNA, a nonprofit research group in Arlington, Virginia, that advises U.S. defense leaders. “For China right now, it’s really just China and Russia.” The two nations’ association with Brazil, India and South Africa in the BRICS group includes a Joint Committee on Space Cooperation, but they have little to show for it yet.
Russia and the PRC work together in space under five-year plans. The most recent deepens their cooperation in a host of areas: rocket engines, launch vehicles, remote sensing, electronics, space debris recovery, satellite navigation, satellite communication, space planes, and lunar and deep space exploration. Putin raised eyebrows when he said Russia is even helping the PRC modernize its ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. “If you’re sharing BMD technology, that shows a level of trust that Russia has with China,” Pollpeter told Apogee, “because China could use that, perhaps, to overwhelm a Russian system.” The growing security challenge Russia and China pose with their space activities, separately and together, prompted a classified briefing and discussion in early September 2022 by the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon’s top civilian advisor. On the agenda was the two nations’ potential development of orbital and space-to-ground weapons, U.S. response options, and a tabletop exercise involving the Pacific theater, according to the official notice of the meeting.
In this new space race, though, the nation that ushered in the Space Age with the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 likely will take a back seat. It’s the PRC, even as it acknowledges ranking just third among the global space powers, that is sketching out space missions and moving to overtake its one-time space sponsor in both the quality and volume of its space assets.
“China is our pacing threat and we’re watching it very closely,” Army Gen. James H. Dickinson, then head of U.S. Space Command, said at a conference in Australia in March 2022. Russia’s space program began falling into decline with the economic collapse the country suffered after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The PRC, meantime, is a growing world power, with an economy eight times the size of Russia’s, the Council on Foreign Relations reported in June 2022.
“The Russians have had a hard time repopulating their space architecture,” said Jeffrey Edmonds, a Washington, D.C.-based national security strategist and Army Reserve officer who served as director for Russia on the National Security Council. “Whether it’s corruption, or it has succumbed to other defense needs — they talk a big game about trying to build that out and we just haven’t seen it. … They’ve always struggled with electronics, never having really mastered that in the same way the Chinese have.”
Russia nurtured a fledgling PRC space program, making possible the first crewed Chinese space flight in 2003. But by the year 2020, the flow between the two nations experienced a shift. It was now the PRC sending Russia some of the latest in aerospace technology. The resources each nation puts toward space tell the story: The PRC spent $8.9 billion on space programs in 2020, triple its spending from the early 2000s, compared to $4 billion for Russia, according to a report from the France-based space consulting firm Euroconsult. U.S. government spending on space in 2020 was $48 billion, Euroconsult said.
Pollpeter sees Russia-PRC cooperation in space as part of a strengthening of relations overall between the two nations. It’s an association that has waxed and waned in modern times, starting with the early backing Mao Zedong received during the Chinese civil war from Joseph Stalin, through an alliance in the Korean War, Russia’s gift of missile technology during the 1950s, disagreements over national security that drove them apart in 1958, more than two decades of separation, then steps toward renewal as the 1990s approached and the PRC decided it had grown too close to the United States. Since then, Russia and the PRC have been driven toward one another during times when the rest of the world pushed them away — after the massacre of protesters by the People’s Liberation Army at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and with Russia’s decade of aggression toward Ukraine. Several Chinese scholars and analysts told researchers in 2018 that the relationship with Russia is the “best in … history,” and deepening still.
Extraterrestrial endeavors have emerged as a hallmark of the Russia-PRC relationship, the CNA’s Edmonds told Apogee, “because of the international stature and hierarchy that comes from operating in space. It’s a way for them to counterbalance the U.S. … They both wish to be seen as a counterpoint to the Western-led political alternative.”
The relationship rests on three pillars, according to recent analysis by Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: maintaining peace along the countries’ shared border, a convergence of economic structures where Russia provides natural resources and the PRC labor and technical expertise, and a convergence of political values. Even as other nations chastise their behaviors, the PRC cares little, for example, about Russia’s poisoning of dissidents at home and abroad, and Russia has nothing to say about the PRC crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong, Gabuev said during a panel discussion sponsored by the Asia Society in August 2022. The personal relationship between their leaders — “soulmates,” Gabuev called Putin and Xi, long-serving authoritarian leaders close in age and background — helps explain why relations between their nations have reached a peak, he said. It may also explain why the PRC has shown no signs of treating a weaker Russia as a “junior partner,” Edmonds said.
Still, the cooperation only goes so far. The nations pursue different political goals. Russia seeks to retain good relations with India, for example, even as the PRC feuds with India over shared borders and PRC support for India adversary Pakistan. And during annual military exercises in its eastern and western territories — Vostok and Zapad in the Russian language — Russia takes pains to avoid the perception that it’s practicing to invade Japan or South Korea even as it clearly targets European nations in war games. What’s more, Russia flouts international laws and norms abroad through election meddling, political assassination and cyberattacks, while the PRC takes a more careful approach to competition with the West, the Council on Foreign Relations observed in a June 2022 report. Said Edmonds, “It’s not ‘alliance’ in the same sense you have with NATO,” where an attack on one partner nation is seen as an attack on all. “They have different non-overlapping security interests.”
When it comes to space, Russia and the PRC are working toward interoperability and improved performance for their global navigational satellite systems (GNSS), created to compete with the Global Positioning System developed by the U.S. military. In Russia’s case, there’s a long way to go, Edmonds explained. “They just don’t have anywhere near the space-based intelligence capabilities of the United States.”
Pollpeter sees little other indication that any space partnership between the two nations extends to operational alignment. “It probably doesn’t rise to the level of alliance,” he agreed, “but certainly the increasing depth of cooperation between Russia and China in space indicates that they are becoming increasingly close, that this is a relationship that needs to be paid attention to.”
With Russia diminishing as a space power, one test of Chinese ascendancy will be its ability to innovate on its own, Pollpeter said. He expects the answer to come in the next 10 years. Since its inception, the PRC space program has been propelled forward with help from a U.S.-educated rocket pioneer, support from Russia and appropriation of technology from other nations. Gaps holding back its progress include the development of electronic components that are hardened against radiation, enabling them to operate longer in space. PRC nationals have tried repeatedly to steal these closely guarded “rad-hardened chips,” whose export from the United States to the PRC and Russia is prohibited. Early PRC satellites had a life expectancy of just three to five years, though its newer BeiDou GNSS satellites last longer, Pollpeter said.
The PRC estimates that 30% of its space technology today ranks at world-class levels, and it hopes to improve that to 60% by 2030, surpassing Russia, Pollpeter said. By mid-century, before the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party in 2049, the PRC aims to be on par with the United States in many space technologies before emerging eventually as the world’s top space power. The PRC space program is operated by the army, ensuring a dual-purpose, military-civil fusion, Pollpeter said. The goal, according to a 2020 paper he co-authored for the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute, is to become the “enlightened, benevolent hegemon whose power and legitimacy derive from its ability to fulfill other countries’ security and economic needs — in exchange for their acquiescence to Chinese leadership.”
Whatever benefits it may see from closer space ties with Russia, the PRC also stands to suffer from them. The European Space Agency (ESA) and the PRC conducted joint training exercises in 2015 and 2017, their astronauts practicing escapes from a mock Shenzhou capsule in the East China Sea. The cooperation arose from a 2015 agreement to send European astronauts to the Chinese space station Tiangong in 2022. Three astronauts were sent into space last year, and in July 2022, China launched the second module of the space station. The third and final module docked in October 2022. But now, noting the Russia-PRC “without limits” statement, along with their accompanying pledge to oppose expansion of NATO and the PRC’s tacit acceptance of the war in Ukraine, space leaders and scholars across Europe have urged ESA to suspend the PRC collaboration, the agency’s website reported in July 2022.
Meantime, the United States and its allies are expanding their cooperation in space. The Artemis Accords are an invitation to all nations to join in a shared vision of principles, grounded in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, “to create a safe and transparent environment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy.” More than two dozen countries have signed the accords. The ESA is a key partner in test launches, already underway, that will lead to crewed missions to the moon. Russia and the PRC have questioned the legitimacy of the accords and are pursuing their own path, seeking partners in their planned orbital and polar missions to the moon — but without the vision for space exploration that are at the center of the Artemis Accords.
“As to who’s really doing substantive international cooperation in space, it is the United States,” Pollpeter said. “What we haven’t seen is China coming up with an alternative example. … In some respects, they snipe at what the U.S. is doing, but they have yet to propose an alternative framework.” Another advantage in space for the U.S. and its allies comes from commercial innovation. Companies such as SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are helping bring down the cost of lifting payloads into space, encouraged by civilian and military space policy that once viewed private enterprise as hired hands to do the government’s bidding. In many respects, the tables have turned with government agencies following the lead of commercial advances in areas such as small-satellite deployment.
The PRC is trying to jump-start commercial innovation in space, too. Fueled by the release in 2014 of funding to “encourage the private capital’s participation in China’s construction of civilian space infrastructure,” the PRC boasted more than 100 aerospace companies by July 2020. But private enterprise works differently in China. “From what I can see, they are not capable right now of producing the sort of innovation we have seen coming out of the U.S. commercial space sector,” Pollpeter said. One reason: From Xi on down, leaders in the PRC want to limit the role of the commercial sector to that of a supplement to the state-owned sector. This provides little incentive for those who now are in control to provide crucial cooperation to upstart commercial ventures. “They want to reduce costs, but the extent to which we’ll see a Space X develop there, to me that’s still a question.”
Government control has proven even more stifling in Russia, made worse by the war in Ukraine, Edmonds said. “They just don’t have an entrepreneurial atmosphere there. These giant government corporations suck up talent and it’s just wasted. And it’s going to be that way for a long time. Brain drain was a problem before, and a lot of younger Russians — younger, smarter Russians — don’t believe in this war. They’ve headed off to other countries to make money.”
The threat to withdraw after more than 20 years from the International Space Station, though later dropped and of little practical impact as the station enters its final phase of operation, signaled a shift in Russia’s view of its role in the world. It’s a shift that helped trigger a defensive response from a former ally in space. “Russia is effectively ending a very successful diplomatic endeavor built on the progress and expansion of humanity,” said Mir Sadat, a former policy director with the National Security Council, during a conversation published in July 2022 by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Atlantic Council. “The U.S. Department of Defense realized this unfortunate evolution about six years ago, when it recognized space as another warfighting domain.” Russia signed a deal to send cosmonauts to the PRC space station, then in August 2022, unveiled plans for its own space station. The Russian platform would be staffed twice a year for extended periods, but few other details were released. In another example of international withdrawal, following sanctions imposed for its seizure of Crimea, Russia stopped supplying engines for Atlas V rockets used on NASA missions.
With threats to withdraw from the ISS, and with Russia doubling down in Ukraine, no bright spots remain in U.S.-Russia relations, retired Air Force Col. Terry Virts told National Public Radio during an interview aired in August 2022. Virts commanded the space station in 2014 and 2015, working alongside Russian cosmonauts. “We’ve had a great partnership with Russia. We’ve treated them with respect; it’s been an equal marriage.” But the 20-year partnership has done little to change Russian behavior on the world stage, Edmonds said: “There’s very little keeping any cooperation going between Russia and United States.” What’s more, Russia and the PRC have drawn international condemnation for conducting ground-based anti-satellite missile tests in recent years, creating fields of dangerous space debris — even as the two countries push the U.S. to sign a treaty banning such weapons in space. “That’s just very typical Russian rhetoric,” Edmonds said. “You say one thing and do the opposite. … If they had the ability to put weapons in space, they would. They always just try to use the U.N. and international institutions as a way of hemming in the United States.”
As Russia and the PRC strengthen their cooperation in space, more may be happening outside the public eye, Edmonds said. The two nations traditionally make self-congratulatory public announcements at each new handshake. But researchers concluded this may be changing, he said, as they explored whether Russia ever followed through on Putin’s announcement of help for the PRC with its ballistic missile defense. There are no signs it did, Edmonds said, but he added: “We did get the sense that a lot of the cooperation was becoming more covert, so there is a concern that there are types of space cooperation going on behind closed doors that they’re not talking about.”
That’s in sharp contrast with the approach of the U.S. and its expanding community of allies in space. “Human exploration in space is expensive,” Pollpeter said. “Could we foot the bill ourselves? Yeah, but it always helps to have partners. There’s also the political rationale for it — that we reach out and get other countries involved, then they would be less likely to join the Chinese there. The difference between China and the United States is that we actually have partners.”