China and Arab countries want to cooperate in space

Gasoline: China wants to cooperate more closely in space with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among others.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping, perhaps the most notable speaker at the event in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, said during a speech that “China is ready to cooperate with the GCC countries”.
• This collaboration would encompass just about every aspect of space travel, such as “remote sensing and communications satellites, space exploitation, building space infrastructure, and selecting and training astronauts.”
• China is also said to be willing to welcome GCC astronauts to its newly launched space station. Tiangong. This station has been built in orbit over the past two years and has been completed since November. So far, only Chinese taikonauts have entered the station.
• Finally, China says it is open to future lunar missions with the GCC countries. “Joint deep space exploration” is also a possibility.

No concrete agreements yet

But: Although President Xi indicated that he was quite ambitious, no concrete agreement was reached at the conference.

• So far, China has almost only built a space program from scratch. The country only launched a taikonaut into space for the first time in 2003.
• So far, the country has no experience in training astronauts in languages ​​other than Chinese. We do not yet know how this will work in practice.
• Nevertheless, the country has long spoken of its interest in cooperating with other countries. The Chinese space agency CAST would even consider using the Tiangong station to developso that it can accommodate more astronauts.