US-China Tech Race: Shock and Awe
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the latest episode of this Tech Tonic season about US-China tech rivalry, the FT’s US-China correspondent Demetri Sevastopulo tells the inside story of his scoop on China’s secret hypersonic weapon test and how it changed geopolitics. We hear about the new space race between China and the US, including powerful satellite-destroying missiles and the pursuit of commercial space capabilities. Could China and the US ever co-operate on space exploration or are we seeing the dawn of a new space race?
Presented by James Kynge, the FT’s global China editor, this episode features interviews with US congressman Mike Gallagher; Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society.
Check out stories and up-to-the-minute news from the FT’s technology team at ft.com/technology
For a special discounted FT subscription go to https://www.ft.com/techtonicsale
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Hosted by James Kynge. Interview with congressman Mike Gallagher conducted by Demetri Sevastopulo. Edwin Lane is senior producer. Josh Gabert-Doyon is producer. Manuela Saragosa is executive producer. Sound design is by Breen Turner, with original music from Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The FT News Briefing is supported by Equinole, the UK's energy partner. Learn more at equinole.co.uk. |
| 0:09.9 | I mean, I have to be very careful and kind of not get into sourcing at all, but I can just say that |
| 0:15.8 | I had a tip that China had done something incredible and that it involved space and that the US |
| 0:23.1 | military was scratching their head. Dimitri Sevastopulo is the FT's US China correspondent. |
| 0:31.0 | In October last year, he landed a massive scoop. The Chinese had tested a weapon that no one knew |
| 0:38.8 | was possible. There were some people who said, no, this story doesn't make sense. The Chinese couldn't |
| 0:45.0 | have done this. The reporting must be wrong. And so over one or two or three days, I think some people |
| 0:50.7 | started thinking, has Dimitri got the story right? But Dimitri had got the story right. |
| 0:57.3 | What he discovered was that in July last year, China had secretly and successfully tested |
| 1:04.7 | a hypersonic weapon, launching it into space where it flew around the world before coming back |
| 1:11.0 | to Earth at least five times the speed of sound. It was quite amazing. The Chinese launched a |
| 1:18.7 | long march rocket, which was carrying something that's called a hypersonic glide vehicle. And the |
| 1:25.1 | best way to think of that is it's almost like a smaller space shuttle, which sits on top of a |
| 1:30.8 | long range rocket. So they launched that rocket into space into lower Earth orbit. |
| 1:37.2 | The rocket with the glider attached, circumnavigated the globe, went all the way around, |
| 1:43.2 | came back in over the South China Sea towards China. And as it was flying over the South China Sea, |
| 1:50.2 | the hypersonic glide vehicle actually fired a projectile or a missile, |
| 1:58.4 | which was an incredible achievement because it is not to find the laws of physics, |
| 2:03.8 | but there are huge constraints that the laws of physics impose on something that's flying that |
| 2:09.8 | fast, which make it extremely difficult to fire something from a weapon traveling at that speed. |
| 2:15.7 | The Chinese accomplished that and it stunned the Pentagon because the most advanced military |
| 2:20.5 | scientists in the US military and intelligence community don't know how to do that. |
... |
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