Our 1st "Dine and Debate" event (May 2005)!
The first ISU-France "dine and debate" event held in Paris was a success!
To open up the series of those new ISU-France events, a provocative theme was chosen: “Asian Countries, A new Race to the Moon ?”. The 21st century could see indeed many countries entering the area of planetary exploration. In particular, three countries in Asia intend to launch lunar missions in the coming years: India, China, and Japan have all announced substantial efforts to develop their own Moon missions.
To address this topic and more generally space cooperation / competition in Asia, we had two guest speakers: Isabelle Sourbès Verger, a space policy expert (CNRS, Laboratoire Communication & Politique), who provided us with pointers on Chinese and Japanese space programmes, and B. Vasudevan (Indian Space Research Organisation), who presented vividly the Indian space programme.
The dinner started by the brief presentations from the experts, providing the grounds for the discussion. The participants were also distributed some background material on the respective space exploration programmes of India, Japan and China.
Then all through the meal, moments were devoted for very lively exchanges between the experts and the participants, with questions and comments.
A key lesson learned from the discussions was that westerners, especially space-related medias, tend to project their views on Asian space-faring efforts so much in the overall space community that some events are taken out of their context. A good example was given by the would-be competition between the Indian and Chinese lunar missions.
According to our experts, it is for example too simplistic to assume China and India are engaged in a space race. Both countries have their own specific strategic and societal agenda, and those two items are of paramount importance in their space programmes, much more so than the moon.
Therefore, an external and professional analysis should always focus on what a country official policy and documents really say, rather than interpret what western articles tend to write – even if the language barrier is sometimes important (come on, let's get on with Chinese and Japanese lessons!).
At the end of the evening, the importance of ISU’s three ‘I’ philosophy seemed to take again its full significance for space professionals: one should have an international - not only Western – perspective when looking at foreign space programmes. All participants enjoyed very much the experience. A new “dinner debate” will be organised in autumn 2005. If you want to learn more about the ISU-France association’s activities, contact us!