Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Beijing cannot accept any country acting as the “world’s judge” after the United States captured Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.
The world’s second-largest economy has provided Venezuela with an economic lifeline since the U.S. and its allies ramped up sanctions in 2017, purchasing roughly $1.6 billion worth of goods in 2024, the most recent full-year data available.
Almost half of China’s purchases were crude oil, customs data shows, while its state-owned oil giants had invested around $4.6 billion in Venezuela by 2018, according to data from the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which tracks Chinese overseas corporate investment.
The current monster they have completed in 2022, Tiangong, was the third in a series of stations, the previous Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 stations were mostly meant to test technique and technology but were remarkable achievements in their own right. They currently have the largest and most active space program in the world. I didn’t even touch on their lunar program, their heavy satellite capability and their list of recent and upcoming solar-system probes.
Oh the ISS is definitely bigger than anything ever sent to space, as I would expect from an international project that was built by a coalition of countries in better days, but it doesn’t really compare to China’s long-term goals and plans that have been on schedule. China is absolutely dominating space right now and will be into the future unless the US just suddenly gets it shit together and elects people who care about science and exploration, and even then it will take many years or decades now to undo the damage that trumpism has done to the US’s global leadership in space science.
The ISS is going to be deorbited in 2031, and I am not expecting a bigger, newer project to replace it. At this point I am not expecting to have access to health care broadly in 2031 in the US.
No argument there. China definitely has the better and more advanced space program. The ISS might get extended again if it doesn’t break and once people realize there is nothing comparable ready by 2030/31, but yes, eventually, there will be no international nor western space station in orbit for the foreseeable future.