Across the long arc of human navigation — from sailors reading stars at sea to probes threading the outer solar system — the challenge has always been the same: how does one find one's way when no familiar landmark is near? China is now building its own answer to that question, developing an autonomous star-based navigation system inspired by NASA's StarNAV concept to guide a future spacecraft to Jupiter, a world nearly a billion miles away at its farthest. The move signals not merely a technical milestone, but a deepening of the global contest to determine which nations will shape humanity's