An opinion piece by Australian writer John Birmingham published on December 17, 2013 inside Brisbane Times supplies a hint of how the landing from the Chinese Chang'e 3/Jade rabbit is now being seen in countries outside China as well as 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 as it marks the arrival on the emerging Chinese superstate about the highest frontier; since it throws into sharp relief the retreat in the US from space; and since it presages a different 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 short the new space race will be between China along with a bevy of western businesses like SpaceX, Planetary Resources, and Golden Spike, and others. This is actually, in contrast to 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 his or her nation state to back them up, a gaggle of commercial miners around the moon, say, website will be out of luck if China thought we would jump their claim.
Birmingham is appropriate that NASA can be a captive to crazy politics. But it needs liberating unless one desires that China becomes the dominate space power for the planet, thus taking possession on the future.
Ironically Birmingham is most beneficial known from the United States because the author of the trilogy of alternate history novels the location where the United States is destroyed by an established unknown entity.