לשם שמים
5
Spring 2021
The Burgeoning Space Race and the AntiMilitant By Luke Finkelstein
In 1969, the U.S. landed on the moon.1 Then there was silence. This is, of course, a poor summary of the Space Race of the Cold War: Russia successfully launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into low Earth orbit; Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet, became the first person in space. Indeed, the U.S. only “won” the Space Race at the very end, but this is not how Americentrism would report it.2 Still, the Cold War ended, and NASA was reimagined as the scientific body, not a military one, that it can genuinely claim to be today.3 Then, in 2019, the U.S. established the Space Force, creating a branch not interested in science or discovery, but rather in military opportunity.4 The U.S. is not alone in its ambitions. Indeed, space is on the verge of being militarized in a more diverse and complex form than it ever was in the 1960s, but it must be realized as a place of scientific discovery and international collaboration instead.
One main reason why the world may be converging upon a new space race is because the United States has convinced itself of the looming inevitability of the race. In 2019, the Trump administration, viewing the lack of U.S. space militarization as a domestic liability, founded the Space Force.5 Its mission statement focuses on a U.S. military presence in space, calling for “acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces.”6 In a speech about the founding of this new military branch, then-Vice President Mike Pence spelled out why these objectives were so necessary: “we’re
in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher.”7 He may have been referencing a 2019 report produced under the same administration, in which U.S. intelligence highlighted the growing space prowess of China. The research suggests that China’s main goal is to militarize space, and that “it is likely to accomplish in 20 years what took the United States 40 years to complete.”8 The fact that China is communist, echoing the ideological battle between the communist Soviet Union and capitalistic United States, further drills into the Ameri-centric mind that the world is gearing up for another space race.9 And if China can do in 20 years what the U.S. can do in 40, then the U.S. is already behind. While there are psychological elements that raise fears of being left behind, the overall assumption is well-founded: China has meticulously tended to its space aspirations for decades, and the U.S. has done little to respond.10 In 1957, just after Sputnik was launched, Mao Zedong declared to the U.S. and other countries, “we too shall make satellites.”11 Under Xi Jinping, China has been accomplishing far more than that. While NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is one of the first budgets to get cut during a new fiscal year, China has prioritized its space industry with firm resolve.12 According to the same U.S. governmental report, China’s space ambitions are “backed by high levels of funding and political support.”13 While China’s budget is undisclosed, the U.S.’s claims can be confirmed
