Moscow’s missiles could explode China’s Space Station dreams

This was supposed to be the golden year of China’s Space Station dreams: an orbital observatory attracting pan-European astronauts and marking Beijing’s peaceful, triumphant rise on the globe’s stage. But that future is now disappearing, like a fleeting mirage.

Three taikonauts have already rocketed to the outpost, circling the planet at 28,000 kilometres per hour. After humans and robots integrate two science modules into the station in the summer of 2022, they were slated to host confrères sent by the European Space Agency (ESA).

ESA leaders stunned the world - and their counterparts at NASA - when they unveiled a joint astronaut training exercise five years ago, with EU and Chinese space-pilots staging a simulated capsule crash landing and rescue mission on the East China Sea.

The head of ESA’s astronaut training, Ruediger Seine, told reporters, “I see this as another milestone … with China as a space partner.” “The ultimate goal is for ESA to establish long term cooperation with China and for ESA astronauts to fly on China’s space station” by 2022.

But a world-changing decision by China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping, and the chain reaction of crises it has helped set in motion, is almost certain to annihilate any Chinese-European space alliance. On February 4th, the rulers of China and Russia signed a nonaggression pact.

Allying the superstates Eurasia and Eastasia (in an echo of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four), they pledged to jointly oppose, beyond their borders, NATO’s expansion and “color revolutions” like the democracy protests that toppled a dictator in Ukraine but were crushed in Hong Kong.

Days later, during televised talks with French President Macron aimed at preventing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, neo-Tsar Vladimir Putin told the world he could launch nuclear missiles in any showdown with NATO. He began staging simulated atomic assaults in nuclear war games.

Putin repeated these terroristic nuclear threats while firing missiles at Ukraine’s kindergartens, hospitals, refugees and atomic power plants, and placed his strategic forces on high alert. The UN’s General Assembly met in an extraordinary session to review Russia’s invasion.

140 countries voted to condemn Russia’s mass attacks on civilians and nuclear warmongering, but China abstained. Beijing joined forces with Moscow to launch doublespeak propaganda campaigns across the Web that call the war a special military operation to bring peace to Ukraine.

ESA has cut almost all ties with Russia, but so far hasn’t openly repudiated its linkup with China. Yet some space leaders say halcyon plans to shoot EU aeronauts to China’s Space Station have been frozen, unlikely ever to be revived unless Beijing renounces its axis with Moscow.