An opinion piece by Australian writer John Birmingham published on December 17, 2013 from the Brisbane Times gives a hint of how the landing with the Chinese Chang'e 3/Jade rabbit has seen in countries away from China plus the United States.
Birmingham is aware that Chinese moon landing like a significant and largely positive development, albeit not for America's own space agency.
'Significant given it marks the arrival from the emerging Chinese superstate about the highest frontier; given it throws into sharp relief the retreat with the US from space; and because doing so presages a whole new realm of competition between Beijing's massive state supported space program as well as the growing band of private, western firms trying to extract value from cold rocks from the sky.'
In short the new space race are going to be between China along with a bevy of western brands like SpaceX, Planetary Resources, and Golden Spike, amongst others. This is actually, unlike Birmingham's assessment, a potentially bad situation.
The reason things could turn ugly is China provides the military muscle of any government to back its space ambitions. Without their particular nation state to back them up, a gaggle of commercial miners within the moon, say, can be out of luck if China chose to jump their claim.
Birmingham is appropriate that NASA is often a captive to crazy politics. But it needs liberating unless one desires that check here China becomes the dominate space power within the planet, thus taking possession with the future.
Ironically Birmingham is better known from the United States as being the author of any trilogy of alternate history novels where the United States is destroyed by an confirmed unknown entity.