Space Wars - Coming to the Sky Near You?

Both the U.S. and China have announced intentions of returning humans to the moon by 2020 at the earliest. And the two countries are already in the early stages of a new space race that appears to have some of the heat of the one between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War, when space was a proxy battleground for geopolitical dominance.

China's manned space program, codenamed Project 921, is indeed a matter of considerable national pride for a country that sees space exploration as confirmation of superpower status. China is pouring substantial resources into space research, according to Dean Cheng, an Asian affairs specialist at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analysis. With a budget estimated at up to $2 billion a year, China's space program is roughly comparable to Japan's. Later this year, China plans to launch its third manned space mission — a prelude to a possible lunar foray by 2024. With President George W. Bush vowing to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020, some competition is perhaps inevitable.

China's space program lags far behind that of the U.S., of course. "They're basically recreating the Apollo missions 50 years on," says Joan Johnson-Freese, chair of the National Security Studies Department at the U.S. Naval War College and an expert on China's space development. "It's a tortoise-and-hare race. They're happy plodding along slowly and creating this perception of a space race."

But there may be more at stake than national honor. Some analysts say that China's attempts to access American space technology are less about boosting its space program than upgrading its military. China is already focusing on space as a potential battlefield. A recent Pentagon estimate of China's military capabilities said that China is investing heavily in anti-satellite weaponry. In January 2007, China demonstrated that it was able to destroy orbiting satellites when it brought down one of its own weather satellites with a missile.

China clearly recognizes the significance of this capability. In 2005, a Chinese military officer wrote in the book Joint Space War Campaigns, put out by the National Defense University, that a "shock and awe strike" on satellites "will shake the structure of the opponent's operations system of organization and will create huge psychological impact on the opponent's policymakers." Such a strike could hypothetically allow China to counterbalance technologically superior U.S. forces, which rely heavily on satellites for battlefield data. China is still decades away from challenging the U.S. in space. But U.S. officials worry espionage may be bringing China a little closer to doing so here on Earth.

Now i think that its a big dangar for the world there is a need of stop this war for a beautiful world and human beings.

I also ask to all member:  whats a advantages and disadvantageous of this war?