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The second-ever manned Chinese space flight is slated to carry two astronauts on a five-day journey circling Earth, while they conduct experiments on pig sperm. But the flight's importance reaches far beyond any advances in animal husbandry that may result from exposing hog semen to weightlessness. It is the latest shot fired in a fiercely competitive space showdown between China and Japan.

The contest may not be accompanied by the blaring cold-war overtones of the last great space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. China's space program is conducted largely in secret, and Japan's modest achievements don't make headlines. But plenty is at stake. Over the past few years, a centuries-old rivalry between China and Japan has flared anew. While the two countries are increasingly interdependent economically, relations remain uncomfortably strained as fast-growing China begins to challenge Japan as the preeminent East Asian power. This spring, for example, anti-Japan riots erupted in a number of Chinese cities, and diplomatic disputes over natural-gas-field rights in the East China Sea continue to rage.

With the two countries mired in a state of low-grade tension, it's not surprising that their efforts to be (and be seen as) the region's heavyweight have entered a new and higher frontier. Both countries are focusing on increasingly visible and expensive manned missions and unmanned lunar landings within the next two decades. Space exploration is one area of national endeavor where developing China, the third nation to put a man in orbit around Earth, is not scrambling to catch up with its wealthier, more technologically advanced rival. Make no mistake, says Joan Johnson-Freese, the chair of the National Security Studies Department at the U.S. Naval War College, "China is on a fast track into space," and that has definitely caught Japan's attention.

The alarm bell went off at 9 a.m. on Oct. 15, 2003. That was the moment when China's Shenzhou V spacecraft lifted off the pad carrying Yang Liwei, a 38-year-old lieutenant colonel and former fighter pilot in the People's Liberation Army. Although his flight was only 21 hours long, Yang's accomplishment triggered a historic outpouring of national pride, with China's state media portraying the country's first manned space shot as a triumph of native science, technology and collective will. Soon after the success of Shenzhou V, China upped the ante, announcing plans to launch an unmanned lunar orbiter before 2007 and a lunar lander by 2010. Chinese officials have also indicated that the nation's ultimate goal is to land a man on the moon.

In Japan, the Shenzhou V launch was met with disbelief and anxiety that continues to reverberate among scientific and political circles. "We were surprised," says Masashi Okada, a launch-systems engineer at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the country's equivalent of NASA. "Obviously we knew they were working toward it, but they achieved manned flight very quickly." Japan's own space program had been in decline for years, hobbled by a habit of following the U.S.'s lead and by domestic regulatory barriers that bar programs with potential military applications. Between 1999 and 2004, the space program's budget had fallen nearly 30% to $1.8 billion, roughly one-tenth of NASA's annual budget. Despite having the world's second-largest economy, Japan has focused mainly on scientific research and telecommunications projects.

But in November 2004, Keiji Tachikawa, the former president of mobile-phone giant NTT DoCoMo, became president of JAXA. His mission: to redefine the agency's goals, win over an unenthusiastic public, and secure more generous funding from a skeptical government. This April, Tachikawa unveiled a new long-term planning statement titled "JAXA Vision 2025" designed to turn the space agency around and establish a manned space program. Over the next 10 years, says Tachikawa, JAXA will study the advisability of lunar exploration and figure out whether Japan should initiate its own manned program. The process won't be quick: he hopes for government approval by 2015.

Tachikawa acknowledges that China's recent feats in space have been a powerful motivator for Japan to pursue an aggressive program of its own. "There are countries which have manned spacecraft, like Russia and the U.S., and those who don't," he says. "China beat us to it, so it is plainly 1-0. We are fully aware that our space-development program has to include manned spacecraft."

Japan already has a modest manned program, but it's dependent on the patronage of the U.S. Eight Japanese astronauts have been trained by NASA, and five of them have flown space-shuttle missions (including the flight of Discovery in August that marked the first shuttle mission since Columbia disintegrated upon reentry in 2003). At Tsukuba Space Center, JAXA's main campus, located about a 40-minute train ride northeast of Tokyo, Yoshiyuki Hasegawa and his team were recently putting the finishing touches on Japan's next small step. In a gigantic clean room the size of a warehouse, Hasegawa oversees the assembly of the $3.25 billion Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), Japan's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS). After the module tubes are finished, launched aboard a space-shuttle flight sometime in 2007, assembled and attached to the ISS, three Japanese astronauts will live in the JEM for three to six months at a time. "This is an essential opportunity for us to develop new technology for manned space travel," Hasegawa says. In addition to numerous experiments, a major priority for the mission is for Japan to learn more about comfortable space living.

But for a country that virtually invented the world's most successful and frequently imitated quality-control systems in high technology and heavy industry, Japan's ability to soar into space on its own has proven surprisingly ill-starred. The country's domestically developed rockets have suffered five launch failures out of 49 since 1980, well below internationally acceptable levels. (China has lost eight rockets in 80 launches.) The most recent humiliation for Japan was an aborted launch of two spy satellites in 2003, when one of the flagship H-2A rockets' two boosters failed to separate from the main rocket shortly after lift-off. JAXA president Tachikawa admits this mixed record is a large stumbling block. "There are people who think that a manned Japanese rocket is not worth the risk," he says. "The only way to make them change their minds is to increase the trust in our rockets. We have to show that it is safe to send people into space."

That will be no easy task. With budget constraints making a completely new rocket class unlikely any time soon, Japanese engineers are examining ways to refit the H-2A, originally designed primarily to carry satellites into orbit, for human flight. That's why a current project to turn an H-2A capsule into a cargo ferry bringing supplies to the ISS and returning a payload of garbage to Earth has become a particularly important dry run—a demonstration of the feasibility of using the H-2A system to transport humans into space and to get them home safely.

A good deal is on the line. Space exploration is a powerful rallying point for national pride. It's also linked to military development—a benefit China can exploit in ways that Japan cannot. Japan has always had to promote and execute its space program exclusively for peaceful purposes. In China, however, the space program is still effectively run by the military. The possible military advances open to China through unmanned missions are causing as much nervousness in Japan and the U.S. as the hero-making, nationalism-stirring manned flights. Both the U.S. and Japan cried foul when the European Space agency announced in 2003 that it was taking on China as a partner in its Galileo project, a new satellite navigation system that will compete with America's GPS network. "For a relatively small amount of money, so say the U.S. and Japan, the E.U. has given China possible access to European high technology in space with potential military applications," says Axel Berkofsky, senior policy analyst at the European Policy Center in Brussels. And although manned space flight is reputed to be an inefficient way to develop military prowess, a recent study by the East Asian nonproliferation project at the Monterey Institute of International Studies concluded that the Shenzhou program has improved China's imaging and reconnaissance capabilities, as well as the maneuverability of its satellites. A 2001 Pentagon report declared that the militarization of space was inevitable and that China would be the U.S.'s leading rival in this arena.

The Chinese deny having much military interest in space, insisting their zeal is almost exclusively scientific, economic and patriotic. At a technology conference late last year in Hainan province, Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist for China's lunar space program, laid out the country's rationale for pursuing increasingly expensive exploration in a developing country where there are a lot of claims on public funds. "The lunar exploration project will spur high-tech development," he explained. "And I cannot calculate how much return there will be on that investment." He also spoke of the space program's appeal as a means of stirring and unifying the citizenry: "The lunar-exploration project will have a valuable effect on the ethnic spirit and motivation of the Chinese people, and I ask you, how much is that worth?"

In Japan, attitudes toward space travel remain more ambivalent. It's an open question whether this is a sign of the nation's lingering lack of confidence after a long and painful hit to its status as a global economic power, or a mature and rational reluctance to get dragged into a wasteful and ultimately pointless race. It may wound Japanese national pride that China has pulled ahead in such a technologically complex field, but in Japan, many question whether the scientific and economic payoff of an expanded space program justifies either the risks or the expense. According to Eiichiro Sekigawa, Japan correspondent of Aviation Week magazine, if Japan implements every initiative outlined in Vision 2025, it will cost $2.5 to $2.8 billion a year, compared with JAXA's current budget of $1.8 billion. Sekigawa doubts such increases will find much political backing. "The government doesn't seem that interested in space at the moment," he says. Johnson-Freese of the U.S. Naval War College sees no evidence that Japan will commit the resources needed to chase China in space: "Technologically, everyone understands that the Japanese could pretty much do whatever they want, but it's the politics that get in the way."

As an authoritarian state, China has a distinct advantage. The central government not only controls the space program, it also controls the media, which plays up the supposed benefits of space exploration while concealing the size of the tab for this grand adventure. But to Beijing, the prize is worth the price: symbolically, a victory in space would be a rousing validation of its increasingly credible claim to be Asia's true economic and technological power, a status Japan has boasted for most of the last century and is loath to cede. The issue now, as China prepares to increase its advantage in manned space flight to 2-0, is whether Japan will soon experience a "Sputnik moment" and feel it has no choice but to redouble its efforts as a matter of national honor—or whether it will continue to dedicate the bulk of its vast resources to more practical priorities here on Earth.

• Jim Frederick
• Three decades after the U.S. beat the Soviet Union to the moon, China and Japan have launched rival space odysseys of their own