The U.S. State Department, under the leadership of Secretary Marco Rubio’s, has forced the Chilean government to suspend a joint project between the private Catholic University of the North (UCN) in northern Chile and China’s National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) to build the Ventarrones Astronomical Center in the Atacama Desert. In December of last year, Newsweek published the results of its investigation, claiming that while the Ventarrones project would certainly conduct astronomical research, it could also “help China’s fast growing military space program through secretive work that would exclude Chilean researchers.” Under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the U.S. has made the same accusation against China’s deep space tracking station in Neuquén, Argentina, claiming that the People’s Liberation Army is secretly operating military projects there, from which Argentine scientists are “excluded.” When Newsweek asked Secretary Rubio about the Chilean project, he replied that there’s not enough room in the Western Hemisphere for both the U.S. and China.
The Chinese Embassy in Santiago issued a strongly-worded letter on April 14, denouncing the U.S. for obstructing the “normal astronomical and technological cooperation between China and Chile.” The main technology at the Ventarrones astronomical center, it stated, is the Transient Objects Monitoring, or TOM, project. This, it reported, “belongs to the category of time-domain astronomy [which] aims to observe various time-domain astronomical events such as supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational waves, as well as celestial bodies in the Solar System through sky survey telescopes. It is of great significance for revealing major scientific issues … and the origin of superheavy elements in the universe.” Slamming U.S. hypocrisy, the embassy pointed out that the exact same technology as the TOM, such as the Large Survey Telescope (LSST), was installed last January at the U.S.-financed Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile which “covers all the scientific research objectives of the TOM project.”
