An opinion piece by Australian writer John Birmingham published on December 17, 2013 within the Brisbane Times comes with a hint of how the landing in the Chinese Chang'e 3/Jade rabbit has been seen in countries outside China and also the United States.
Birmingham understands that Chinese moon landing to be a significant and largely positive development, albeit not for America's own space agency.
'Significant as it marks the arrival in the emerging Chinese superstate within the highest frontier; as it throws into sharp relief the retreat in the US from space; and because doing so presages a brand new realm of competition between Beijing's massive state supported space program as well as the growing band of private, western firms aiming to extract value from cold rocks from the sky.'
In short the new space race will likely be between China as well as a bevy of western businesses 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 always that China provides the military muscle of your government to back its space ambitions. Without their very own nation state to back them up, a small grouping of commercial miners about the moon, say, can be out of luck if China chosen to jump their claim.
Birmingham meets your needs that NASA is really 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 from the future.
Ironically Birmingham is most beneficial known inside the United States since the click here author of the trilogy of alternate history novels when the United States is destroyed by an up to now unknown entity.