An opinion piece by Australian writer John Birmingham published on December 17, 2013 inside Brisbane Times comes with a hint of how the landing in the Chinese Chang'e 3/Jade rabbit will be seen in countries outside China as well as the United States.
Birmingham understands that Chinese moon landing as being a significant and largely positive development, albeit not for America's own space agency.
'Significant as it marks the arrival on the emerging Chinese superstate for the highest frontier; since it throws into sharp relief the retreat in the US from space; and since it presages a different realm of competition between Beijing's massive state supported space program as well as the growing band of private, western firms planning to extract value from cold rocks inside the sky.'
In plain english the new space race will be between China and also a bevy of western brands like SpaceX, Planetary Resources, and Golden Spike, amongst others. This is actually, despite Birmingham's assessment, a potentially bad situation.
The reason things could turn ugly is the fact China gets the military muscle of an government to back its space ambitions. Without their particular nation state to back them up, a team of commercial miners around the moon, say, can be out check here of luck if China chosen to jump their claim.
Birmingham is correct that NASA is usually a captive to crazy politics. But it needs liberating unless one desires that China becomes the dominate space power about the planet, thus taking possession in the future.
Ironically Birmingham is better known within the United States since the author of an trilogy of alternate history novels the place that the United States is destroyed by an up to now unknown entity.