The competition between the US and China to explore outer space turned prickly after Chinese diplomats blasted the head of NASA and encouraged neighboring countries to support Beijing’s plan for exploring the moon.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) on Monday accused NASA Administrator Bill Nelson of lying “through his teeth” in response to reported comments in a German tabloid about the space competition between the two countries.
Bild cited Nelson as saying that the world should be concerned that China might lay claim to the moon and stop other countries from exploring it.
Photo: AP
In the interview, he also accused China of stealing technology from other nations and said that Beijing was learning how to destroy satellites launched by other countries.
“This is not the first time for the chief of NASA to lie through his teeth and smear China,” Zhao said at the ministry’s daily news conference. “In recent years, the US openly defined space as a war-fighting domain.”
NASA did not respond to a request for comment.
During a meeting on Monday with officials from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) called on Southeast Asian nations to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a proposed project on or near the moon backed by China and Russia.
Beijing has promoted the ILRS as an alternative to the Artemis Accords, a Washington-backed effort launched in 2020 aimed at supporting NASA’s efforts to return astronauts to the moon this decade.
While Beijing and Moscow have not gotten other governments to commit to their project, the US is having more success convincing countries to sign the Artemis Accords, principles designed to govern activity on the moon, Mars and beyond.
Signatories include NATO allies such as Canada, Italy and the UK, as well as Brazil, Mexico and Ukraine.
Last month, France became the 20th country to sign on to the Artemis club, joining other recent signatories such as Colombia and Singapore.
China has criticized the accords as a US effort to create a NATO in outer space, most recently in a opinion piece published in the Chinese Communist Party-backed Global Times newspaper on Sunday.
“In contrast with the US lunar exploration project known as the ‘Artemis Accords,’ which experts believe reveals its ‘exclusive nature for mimicking a space-based NATO,’ China and Russia’s partnership stresses bringing advancement for all, with the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind,” the article said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS