There's an old joke that the dinosaurs are only extinct because they didn't develop a space agency. The implication, of course, is that unlike our reptilian ancestors, we humans might be able to save ourselves from an impending asteroid strike on Earth, given our six-and-a-half decades of spaceflight experience. But the fact is that while we have achieved amazing things since Sputnik kicked off the space age in 1957, very little effort thus far has gone into developing asteroid deflection technologies. We are woefully inexperienced in this arena, and aside from our Hollywood dramatizations of it, we've never yet put our capabilities to the test. But that's about to change.

Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), announced last week that they plan to carry out an asteroid deflection test as early as 2025—part of a larger asteroid monitoring and defense system that the CNSA is in the early stages of developing.

In 1996, Joseph W. Ashy, former U.S. commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, famously said: "We're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space."

In less than three decades since then, we've seen the establishment of the U.S. Space Force, anti-satellite weapons testing by major spacefaring nations and the rapid development of weapons that can interfere with, disrupt or destroy space assets.

No wonder there are many concerns about the potential of war in space. But the belief in the inevitability of space becoming the next major battlefield runs the risk of becoming, as space law expert Steven Freeland writes, "a self-fulfilling prophecy if care and restraint is not exercised."

It is therefore refreshing that, on April 18, U.S.