An opinion piece by Australian writer John Birmingham published on December 17, 2013 within the Brisbane Times offers a hint of how the landing from the Chinese Chang'e 3/Jade rabbit has been seen in countries over and above China plus the United States.
Birmingham is aware that Chinese moon landing as being a significant and largely positive development, albeit not for America's own space agency.
'Significant given it marks the arrival with the emerging Chinese superstate around the highest frontier; given it throws into sharp relief the retreat with the US from space; and since it presages a whole new realm of competition between Beijing's massive state supported space program as well as the growing band of private, western firms seeking to extract value from cold rocks inside sky.'
In simple terms the new space race will probably be between China and also a bevy of western manufacturers like SpaceX, Planetary Resources, and Golden Spike, amongst others. This is actually, unlike Birmingham's assessment, a potentially bad situation.
The reason things could turn ugly is the fact China gets the military muscle of the government to back its space ambitions. Without their particular nation state to back them up, a gaggle of commercial miners about the moon, say, could well be out of luck if China made a decision to jump their claim.
Birmingham is proper that NASA is usually a captive to crazy politics. But it needs liberating unless one desires that China becomes the dominate space power around the planet, thus taking possession in here the future.
Ironically Birmingham is the most suitable known within the United States because author of the trilogy of alternate history novels the location where the United States is destroyed by an up to now unknown entity.