The Price of Prestige

124 chapter five

distinguish between India’s space program, which works “in the service

of India’s real socio- economic needs,” and the Chinese program, which

followed the tradition of “ephemeral pride building or prestige creating

enterprises.” China, therefore, according to the Indian author, deserved

no praise or prestige for its hollow achievement (Ramesh 2003 ). Russian

officials and editorials congratulated the Chinese on their accomplishment

but were quick to point out that the Shenzhou V was an almost identical

copy of Russian spacecraft to the point where the “spacesuits for Shen-

zhou and Soyuz differ only by the Russian and Chinese flags sewn to the

sleeves” (Saradzhyan 2003 ). China’s success was therefore based on Rus-

sian know- how. Consequently, these editorials imply that the prestige really

belonged to Russia.

American response to the Chinese launch was expressed most openly

in President Bush’s speech on January 15 , 2004 , in which he announced

new plans to return to the moon no later than 2020 and to use lunar bases

as a launching pad for a manned mission to Mars (Sanger and Stevenson

2004 ). If the Chinese were to go the moon, the Americans needed to fly

even farther. In an interview, Joan Johnson- Freese, an expert on space

programs, expressed a widely held view: “The Bush administration had

no choice but to respond to China’s recent successes with a space initia-

tive.... The success allowed China to reach out to other countries and

they’ve been responding favorably, so we could not do nothing” (Yardley

and Board 2004 ). The new American space initiative shows all the symp-

toms of consumption externalities. An enhanced investment in space re-

search would not have taken place if it were not for increased Chinese

consumption. The initiative was clearly a reactive policy that sought to

preserve the consumption gap between the two powers. The threat here

was not to American strategic power but to American prestige. Renewed

interest in space as a status symbol was not limited to the China- US dyad.

Brazil and India also diverted significant resources to the development of

domestic space industries over the last few decades (Yardley and Broad

2004 ; Rother 2004 ; Rohde 2004 ). Having lost the race to be the first Asian

power to send a man into space, India decided to leapfrog over China by

being the first Asian power to reach Mars. In 2013 it launched a Mars or-

biter in an attempt to claim this trophy, successfully reaching Mars’s orbit

in the fall of 2014. An embryonic space race seems to be underway.

The American space initiative was expected to set in motion a broad re-

structuring of NASA. New priorities would be met by diverting resources

away from existing projects. Two of the most likely and notable victims