Has Obama just handed the moon to China?

President Barack Obama's proposal to cut the $81bn funding for Nasa's Constellation manned spaceflight programme spells the end of America's attempt to return people to the moon by 2020. If Congress approves the budget, it almost certainly means the next people to land on the moon will be Chinese. Some people are saying this is a serious strategic error.

Such a strategic withdrawal represents a remarkable turnaround for a country that as recently as 2003 warned that China's "manned space efforts almost certainly will contribute to improved military space systems in the 2010-2020 timeframe".

So claimed a US Defence Department report called 'The Military Power of the People's Republic of China', which for good measure quoted Captain Shen Zhongchang of the Chinese Navy Research Institute as saying: "The mastery of outer space will be a requisite for military victory, with outer space becoming the new commanding heights for combat."

It would be easy to argue this report was a product of its time – when a paranoid Bush administration was looking for enemies to justify its controversial missile defence shield. But if anything the threat from China has increased since then.

Richard Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Virginia, and an authority on Chinese and Asian military affairs, told The First Post: "The problem for the US and its allies is that China's space program is controlled by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and almost every aspect is designed to produce 'dual use', or some kind of military benefit as well as non-military."

For example, the September 2008 Shenzhou-7 mission is remembered mainly for including China's first space walk, but soon after this exercise, the craft launched a 40kg microsatellite as it passed within 45km of the International Space Station. "Was this a social call, practice for future space docking, or an exercise in manned co-orbital anti-satellite interception?" asks Fisher.

In 2007 China shocked the world by becoming only the third nation to shoot down a satellite with a ground-based missile – demonstrating an ability to protect itself from spy satellites.

The US and the Soviet Union ran similar tests in the 1980s, but stopped, largely because of the menace of orbiting debris from the destroyed satellites.

The Chinese space programme gets by on around $1.3bn per year - compared to Nasa's $17.6bn - but it is already proving an embarrassment to America. With a little more of China's undoubted financial might behind it, it could deliver a lunar base some time in the 2020s.

China is adamant any such base would be open to scientists from around the world. But would the Americans be able to swallow their pride and send scientists to a Chinese moon base?

Two months after China's satellite target practice, the former chief administrator of Nasa, Michael Griffin, testified to the US Senate: "The moon is very visible and any proposition by another country to set up a permanent presence there would be unacceptable to the Americans."

More recently, the messages coming from China have been mixed. Air force commander Xu Qiliang told the People's Liberation Army Daily in November 2009: "As far as the revolution in military affairs is concerned, the competition between military forces is moving towards outer space… this is a historical inevitability and a development that cannot be turned back."

Yet around the same time, China and Russia jointly submitted a proposal to the United Nations aimed at securing "a legally-binding agreement banning the deployment of weapons in outer space".

Last month Fisher warned of China's "scary space ambitions" in an article in the Wall Street Journal Asia. He reported claims that China could develop ‘assassin' and laser-armed satellites and may already be developing an 'orbital bomber'.

Fisher told The First Post how an interview with a Russian source had alerted him to the possibility of a "long-term and sophisticated unmanned Chinese Moon base". He points out that China's current Chang'e Moon exploration program has been developed with input from Russia's Lavochkin Corporation, one of the world's experts in unmanned space technologies.

Chang'e 3, which is scheduled to land on the moon in 2013, may carry a small telescope and a laser rangefinder. "It is easy to see how this instrument package could be used to target US deep space satellites, or at some point, even to attack them," says Fisher.

Obama's "cold-blooded" ending of the US moon programme, he adds, "sadly conveys an impression of democratic power in retreat in the face of Chinese communism's advance".

In 2006, President George W Bush released a Space Policy Document. It stressed that the US must "develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries".

At the time, the report was met with general dismay as the lunatic ravings of a warmonger. The Asia Times read: "The US is turning space into its personal colony." But with China seemingly the only participants in an undeclared space race, Bush's policy looks almost reasonable. ·