However, a bipartisan trio of representatives wrote to Bolden this month that the trip might provide an opportunity to talk about increasing cooperation, such as the development of a common docking mechanism and rescue efforts for US, Russian, and Chinese spacecraft. This is certainly a place where Chinese and US interests very much overlap.

However, the expected tidal shift in Congress indicates to me that cooperation will be more difficult.

Last week the New York Times carried an article about the 29 congressmen who have aggressive anti-Chinese election commercials expressing anger about lost jobs. This is just the tip of the Congressional iceberg.

So what's at stake in the rush to the stars? On the defense side, there is no question that space is a new theater of war. As the then Commander-in-Chief of the US Space Command Joseph Ashy said in 1996 that "some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but - absolutely - we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space. We will engage terrestrial targets someday - ships, airplanes, land targets - from space."

Space, however, provides opportunities for the peaceful uses of the vastness beyond our tiny planet's atmosphere.

And contrary to the congressmen who cry wolf, many of our bilateral national interests coincide.

The International Space Station (ISS) is staffed by US, Canadian, EU, Japanese and Russian scientists. The US has relied on Russia for doing some of the heavy Earth to ISS transport of people and equipment.

Our reliance will be even greater after the last Space Shuttle flight next year and until this function can be safely outsourced to private industry. We have obviously overcome our fears of post-Cold War Russia, even though it is a dominant regional player. So why not let China enter the club too before the ISS closes in 2020?

Obama's new space policy encourages bilateral and multinational cooperation. Cooperation makes sense because costs and knowledge are shared.

Space politics makes for some strange bedfellows. Many Tea Partiers actually physically demonstrated against Obama's new space policy because reduced budgets and outsourcing would mean less government jobs. Come on, guys, you can't have it both ways!

The author is former director and vice president at ABC Television. [email protected]