Asian space race

Several Asian countries have space programs and are actively competing to achieve scientific and technological advancements in space, a situation sometimes referred to as the Asian space race in the popular media as a reference to the earlier Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Like the previous space race, issues involved in the current push to space include national security, which has spurred many countries to send artificial satellites as well as humans into Earth orbit and beyond. A number of Asian countries are seen as contenders in the ongoing race to be the pre-eminent power in space.

Of the ten countries that have independently successfully launched a satellite into orbit, six are Asian: China, India, Iran, Israel, Japan and North Korea.

China's first manned spacecraft entered orbit in October 2003, making China the first Asian nation to send a human into space.

India is expected to demonstrate independent human spaceflight by 2020 and human landing on the moon by 2030., and Iran and Japan have plans for independent manned spaceflights around 2020. China is also still predicting manned mission to the Earth moon by 2025 and to Mars by 2050.

While the achievements of space programs run by the main Asian space players (China, India, and Japan) pale in comparison to the milestones set by the former Soviet Union and the United States, some experts believe Asia may soon lead the world in space exploration. China has been the leader of Asia's space race since the beginning of the 21st century. The first Chinese manned spaceflight, in 2003, marked the beginning of a space race in the region. At the same time, the existence of a space race in Asia is still debated due to the non-concurrence of space milestone events like there was for the United States and the Soviet Union. Japan for example was the first power on Earth to get a sample return mission from an asteroid. There was however some concurrence between China and India to see which of those two could be the first to launch a probe to the Earth's moon back in the late 2000s decade. China, for example, denies that there is an Asian space race. In January 2007 China became the first Asian military-space power to send an anti-satellite missile into orbit, to destroy an aging Chinese Feng Yun 1C weather satellite in polar orbit. The resulting explosion sent a wave of debris hurtling through space at more than 6 miles per second. A month later, Japan's space agency launched an experimental communications satellite designed to enable super high-speed data transmission in remote areas.

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Wikipedia