American Ingenuity Is Beating China in Space

T his Fourth of July, remember that the “rocket’s red glare” is increasingly American-made, as the Chinese Communist Party’s most recent attempt to match the Land of the Free came crashing down . . . literally.

This past Sunday, the Chinese Tianlong-3 rocket, which was developed to rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX project, dramatically crashed into a mountainside after it accidentally lifted off during a static fire test near the city of Gongyi in Henan Province. Social-media footage shows the uncontrolled rocket parabolically arcing into the air and exploding on a hill. No one was killed, reportedly. (China isn’t exactly known for being honest about such things.) The local Chinese municipal government confirmed that the rocket’s crash started a fire, which it claimed was rapidly put out.

The rocket, owned by the “private” company Space Pioneer, suffered a “structural failure” of the launch moorings, which are intended to hold the rocket in place. After the accidental launch, the onboard computer automatically shut down, according to a now deleted statement by the company that was translated by the New York Times. The shutdown probably deprived Space Pioneer of a variety of useful data about the incident.

For a while, it looked as if China’s intense focus on space, and the incompetence of U.S.-government administrators, might allow it to surpass Americans’ technological achievements.

Space Pioneer claims that the performance of the two-stage Tianlong-3 is comparable to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The company is a large player in China’s developing commercial space industry, intended to support the Communist government’s ambition to construct a satellite internet system. China’s space program is now comparable in size to the European Space Agency’s. A few years ago, it conducted a successful Mars mission, and, just last week, China became the first country to retrieve rock samples from the far side of the Moon. It aspires to put a person on the Moon before 2030.

But the Tianlong-3 rocket test’s accident is just the latest in a long string of Chinese space-tech disasters. China has suffered a series of failed launches over the years, which have cost the Western companies contracting with them tens of millions of dollars, and the Communists have consistently blamed everyone but themselves. “Until quite recently, many in the space world shared the view that the Long March [an older Chinese rocket design] was pretty shoddy, their quality-control standards weren’t high, and dealing with them was a dicey situation,” John Logsdon, then-director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told the Washington Post in 1998. “It was made worse because many Westerners didn’t have confidence in China’s reviews.”

American space operations, however, have also slowed in recent years. NASA is facing challenges with the Space Launch System (SLS), whose delayed development was intended to replace the aging Space Shuttle after the agency’s troubled Constellation program was scrapped. But SLS looks increasingly unaffordable. NASA has long been largely dependent on Russian rockets to access space, and though it successfully worked with SpaceX to send astronauts to space in 2020, it hasn’t unilaterally done so since 2011.

The reason for this, largely, has been bureaucratic sprawl. To beat the Soviets to the Moon, the U.S. government created a bureaucracy, which quickly devolved into bringing home the space bacon. Later on, former president Barack Obama shifted money from the successful parts of NASA, such as its robotic Mars-exploration program (which involved the author of this article), to projects that produce nothing tangible, such as global-warming research and outreach to “dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science.” The cuts were so dramatic that the famously quiet Neil Armstrong expressed worry about NASA’s giving up its global leadership role. The agency was reduced to holding bake sales for Mars.

The American government might have been grounded, but the American people certainly weren’t.

Starting in 2012, SpaceX began privately delivering cargo to the International Space Station . . . very cheaply. Each Falcon 9 launch costs around $67 million. If the Space Shuttle were around today, it would have cost more than $1.6 billion per launch — almost 24 times more.

And this caused a surge in private American spaceflight.

In 2022, America surpassed China in the rate of rocket launches, more than doubling the 31 launches of 2018 to 78 in 2022, a year when China had 64, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission. America launched 109 rockets in 2023, and SpaceX accounted for 98 of those. Without SpaceX, the U.S. would have launched only eleven rockets that year, compared with China’s 67. Just one private American company launched almost 32 percent more rockets than China did. And this allowed America to launch 2,234 satellites, 1,937 of them by SpaceX. Compare that with Europe’s 253, China’s 213, Russia’s 67, India’s 9, or North Korea’s one. This is just an incredible statement of the power of American free enterprise.

Part of the reason for the success of SpaceX is its embrace of paradigm-shifting, reusable-rocket technology, which drastically reduces the cost of getting into orbit. Instead of having to totally replace expensive rocket components before each flight, reusable rockets pioneered by Musk and SpaceX allow for unparalleled, improved access. Before this innovation, the only working space-shuttle drone was the secretive Boeing X-37, operated by the U.S. Air Force for orbital spaceflight missions.

America’s competitive spirit fuels the remarkable progress made by SpaceX, as the company is far from rivalless in the domestic reusable-rocket-technology market. NASA has a contract to use an automated Sierra Space Dream Chaser spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station with cargo and potentially crewmen. The first flights are scheduled for this year. And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin first reached space with a reusable rocket in 2015.

This Independence Day, while you watch fireworks illuminate the night sky, know that American capitalism is sending more into the heavens than just pyrotechnics.

Remember that America remains one of the world’s freest economies, and, thanks to dynamic private-sector competition, American rockets continue to rule the skies. Happy birthday to the only country to land astronauts on the Moon — and still the leading nation in space travel.