When China built a military-run space station in Argentina’s Patagonian region, it promised to include a visitor center to explain the purpose of its powerful 16-story antenna.
The center is now built — behind the nearly 3m barbed-wire fence that surrounds the entire space station compound. Visits are by appointment only.
Shrouded in secrecy, the compound has stirred unease among local residents, fueled conspiracy theories and sparked concerns in US President Donald Trump’s administration about its true purpose, according to interviews with dozens of residents, current and former Argentine government officials, US officials, satellite and astronomy specialists, and legal experts.
Illustration: Louise Ting
The station’s stated aim is peaceful space observation and exploration, and it played a key role last month in China’s landing of a spacecraft on the dark side of the moon, Chinese media reported.
However, the remote 200-hectare compound operates with little oversight by the Argentine authorities, according to hundreds of pages of Argentine government documents reviewed by international law experts.
Argentina has no physical oversight of the station’s operations, former Argentine minister of foreign affairs Susanna Malcorra said in an interview.
She in 2016 revised the space station deal with China to include a stipulation that it be used for civilian purposes only.
The agreement obliges China to inform Argentina of its activities at the station, but provides no enforcement mechanism for authorities to ensure that it is not being used for military purposes, the international law experts said.
“It really doesn’t matter what it says in the contract or in the agreement,” said Juan Uriburu, an Argentine lawyer who worked on two major Argentina-China joint ventures. “How do you make sure that they play by the rules?”
“I would say that, given that one of the actors involved in the agreements reports directly to the Chinese military, it is at least intriguing to see that the Argentine government did not deal with this issue with greater specificity,” he said.
China’s space program is run by its military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The Patagonian station is managed by the China Satellite Launch and Tracking Control General, which reports to the PLA’s Strategic Support Force.
Beijing has said that its space program is for peaceful purposes and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that the Argentine station is for civilian use only, adding that the station was open to the public and media.
“The suspicions of some individuals have ulterior motives,” the ministry said.
Asked how it ensures the station is not used for military purposes, Argentina’s space agency, CONAE, said the agreement between the two countries stated their commitment to “peaceful use” of the project.
It said radio emissions from the station were also monitored, but radio astronomy experts said that the Chinese could easily hide illicit data in these transmissions or add encrypted channels to the frequencies agreed upon with Argentina.
CONAE also said that it had no staff permanently based at the station, but that they made “periodic” trips there.
The US has long been worried about what it sees as China’s strategy to “militarize” space, according to one US official, who added that there was reason to be skeptical of Beijing’s insistence that the Argentine base was strictly for exploration.
Other US officials have expressed similar concerns.
“The Patagonia ground station, agreed to in secret by a corrupt and financially vulnerable government a decade ago, is another example of opaque and predatory Chinese dealings that undermine the sovereignty of host nations,” US National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said.
Some radio astronomy experts said that US concerns were overblown and that the station was probably as advertised — a scientific venture with Argentina — even if its 35m diameter dish could eavesdrop on foreign satellites.
The station could, in theory, “listen” to other governments’ satellites, potentially picking up sensitive data, US National Radio Astronomy Observatory director Tony Beasley said, but added that far less sophisticated equipment would be capable of that kind of listening.
“Anyone can do that. I can do that with a dish in my backyard, basically,” Beasley said. “I don’t know that there’s anything particularly sinister or troubling about any part of China’s space radio network in Argentina.”
Argentine officials have defended the Chinese station, saying that the agreement with China is similar to one signed with the European Space Agency (ESA), which built a station in a neighboring province.
Both stations have 50-year, tax-free leases. In theory, Argentine scientists have access to 10 percent of the antenna time at each station.
The law experts said there is one notable difference: The ESA is a civilian agency.
“All of the ESA governments play by democratic rules,” Uriburu said. “The party is not the state, but that’s not the case in China — the party is the state.”
In the US, NASA, similar to the ESA, is a civilian agency, while the US military has its own space command for military or national security missions.
In some instances, NASA and the military have collaborated, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell said.
“The line does blur sometimes, but that’s very much the exception,” he said.
In Las Lajas, a town of 7,000 people located about a 40 minute drive from the station, the antenna is a source of bewilderment and suspicion.
“These people don’t allow you access. They don’t let you see,” shop owner Alfredo Garrido, 51, said. “My opinion is that it is not a scientific research base, but rather a Chinese military base.”
Among the wilder conspiracy theories that reporters heard during a visit to the town: That the base was being used to build a nuclear bomb.
The drive from Las Lajas to the space station is barren and dusty. There are no signs indicating the station’s existence. The sprawling antenna is suddenly visible after a curve in the gravel road off the main thoroughfare. The massive dish is the only sign of human life for kilometers around.
The station became operational in April. Thirty Chinese employees live and work on site, which employs no locals, Las Lajas Mayor Maria Espinosa said, adding that the station has been good for the local economy.
Espinosa said she rented her house to Chinese space station workers before they moved to the base and had visited the site herself at least eight times.
Others in Las Lajas said that they rarely see anyone from the station in town, except for when staff members make a trip to its Chinese supermarket.
Reporters requested access to the station through CONAE, the local provincial government and China’s embassy.
CONAE said that it was not able to approve a visit by reporters in the short term, but that it was planning a media day.
Students from nearby towns have already visited the compound, it added.
When the Argentine Congress debated the space station in 2015, during the administration of then-Argentine president Cristina Fernandez, opposition lawmakers questioned why there was no stipulation that it only be for civilian use.
Nonetheless, Congress approved the deal.
When Argentine President Mauricio Macri took office in 2015, he was worried that the space station agreement did not explicitly say that it should be for civilian use only, said Malcorra, his then-minister of foreign affairs, who in 2016 flew to Beijing to rework it.
Malcorra said she was constrained in her ability to revise it, because it had already been signed by Fernandez.
However, the Chinese agreed to include the stipulation that it be for civilian use.
She insisted on a news conference with her Chinese counterpart in Beijing to publicize this, Malcorra said.
“This was something I requested to make sure there was no doubt or no hidden agenda from any side here, and that our people knew that we had done this,” she said from her home in Spain.
However, it still fell short on one key point: oversight.
“There was no way we could do that after the level of recognition that this agreement had from our side. This was recognized, accepted and approved by Congress,” Malcorra said.
“I would have written the agreement in a different way,” she added. “I would have clauses that articulate the access to oversight.”
Malcorra said she was confident that Argentina could approach China for “reassurances” if there was ever any doubt about activities at the station.
Asked how Argentina would know about those activities, she said: “There will be some people who will tell us, don’t worry.”
The opaqueness of the station’s operations, and the reluctance of Argentine officials to talk about it, makes it difficult to determine who exactly has visited the compound.
A provincial government official provided reporters a list of local journalists who had toured the facility. A number appeared to have visited on a single day in February 2017, 14 months before it became operational, a review of their stories and social media postings showed.
Aside from Espinosa, no one else interviewed by reporters in town had toured the station.
However, resident Matias Uran, 24, said his sister was among a group of students who visited last year.
They saw a dining room and a games room, he said.
Alberto Hugo Amarilla, 60, who runs a small hotel in Las Lajas, recalled a dinner that he attended shortly after construction began at the site.
There, a Chinese official who was in town to visit the site greeted him enthusiastically, he said.
Other dinner guests told Amarilla that the official had learned that he was a retired Argentine army officer, saying that the official was a Chinese general.
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