Mirroring their relationship on Earth, the US and Chinese governments could perhaps best be described as frenemies when it comes to outer space policy: the extent of their collaboration involves things like procedures for how to avoid shooting down one another's satellite-guided weapons.
So to advance its ambitious space exploration plans, Xi Jinping's government is now cozying up to the European Union, with talks underway to add China to a European Space Agency-led project to build a human outpost on the moon, the Associated Press reported this week.
The project, which the ESA announced last year, would build a lunar habitat capable both of hosting astronauts for extended periods of time, as well as serving as a jumping-off point for future expeditions to Mars. ESA director Jan Wörner described the planned habitat as a permanent, multinational "moon village" akin to the International Space Station.
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"So it will be the Americans, it will be the Russians, it will be the Chinese, it will be the Indians, the Japanese, and even more countries with smaller contributions," Wörner told Euronews last year.
With China on board, however, getting the US involved might be a difficult task. The Obama administration previously declined to participate in the project before China signed on, and at a Senate hearing on the space industry on Wednesday, companies urged the government to adopt policies that would compete with China in outer space, rather than cooperate.
In other space news, NASA's Cassini spacecraft completed the latest of its several planned forays into Saturn's atmosphere on Wednesday, passing within 1,900 miles of the planet's cloud tops. That's the closest a spacecraft has ever flown to Saturn, NASA said. Cassini's mission is scheduled to end this September with a dive into the planet itself.