Risk of China Surpassing US in Commercial Space Activity Is Growing

The past decade has seen Chinese space efforts transform significantly due to policy reforms, greater investment and an intentional merging of commercial, civil and national security ambitions, CSF President Dave Cavossa said while presenting the report Tuesday in Washington.

CSF's report urged numerous policy steps for the U.S. to counter China’s growing space challenge, ranging from federal investment in spaceports and launch regulatory reforms to ensuring sufficient spectrum availability for commercial space operations and improving the spectrum coordination process between commercial satellite operators and federal agencies.

China is following “a hyper-growth playbook," with investment in commercial space growing from $340 million in 2015 to $2.9 billion last year, said report author Jonathan Roll, an analyst with Arizona State University's Space Technology and Science Initiative. China's launch and satellite communications sectors are particularly big recipients of that investment, and much of the funding is coming from the central government and from city and provincial governments, Roll said. That government spending is induced by national priorities, as well as localities in China competing against one another to become aerospace hubs, he added.

China’s national interest in space dates back almost 70 years, as it views commercial space as a locomotive that helps pull the rest of its economy and techno-industrial base along, said Dean Cheng, a non-resident fellow at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute. It's almost impossible for U.S. firms to sell into key industrial sectors in China, like space, he said. China likely expects to dominate low earth orbit and Earth-to-moon space a decade from now, Cheng added. If, in 2035, China has the only space station in LEO and a manned lunar facility in 2035, while Chinese satellites in LEO outnumber U.S. ones, “what do you think the language of space travel will be?" he asked rhetorically.

House Science Committee Chairman Brian Babin, R-Texas, said that whether the U.S. likes it or not, “China is making great strides compared to what we are doing” in space.

China’s Space Silk Road, which is part of its Belt and Road global infrastructure development approach, has resulted in more than 80 international projects in satellite manufacturing, ground stations and launch services, the CSF report noted. It said Chinese state-owned companies and sanctioned entities are becoming embedded in the space and communications infrastructure of dozens of nations. Absent U.S. countermeasures and targeted alternative opportunities for infrastructure cooperation and market access, many nations “may find their digital and orbital futures tethered to Beijing, eroding American influence and introducing new coercive leverage in international and security domains.”

The report also warned that China now has the capacity to be a “formidable” launch competitor, in part due to heavy Chinese investment in launch infrastructure, while its Tiangong space station “is poised to become the primary hub for orbital science” with the looming retirement of the International Space Station.

Pointing to multiple different space mission authorization regimes that have been proposed in the past 15 years in the U.S., Axiom Space's Jared Stout said China "doesn't have this problem." The U.S. "is never going to out-centrally plan China," but it needs a "transparent, stable, predictable" regulatory regime, said Stout, Axiom's head of government relations and communications. The main constraint on U.S. industry "is the constant whiplash" of regulatory approaches that pivot and change from administration to administration.