The tortoise and the hare: will China beat the US in the race back to the moon? | Space

TEarlier this month, the world watched as NASA sent four astronauts around the moon; However, in order to actually land on the surface, the USA has entered a space race once again, this time with China. And China may well win.

In addition to building habitable bases on the Moon, the first inhabited site on another celestial body, both countries plan to explore for rare resources and use the deep space environment to test technology for future crewed missions to Mars.

The well-funded China National Space Administration (CNSA) opposes the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).

While NASA has the institutional knowledge advantage of having landed on the Moon as part of the Apollo program, it is trying to come back with only a small fraction of the share of the national budget it received in the 1960s.

The US space agency is also vulnerable to government changes every four years, making it difficult to stick to ten-year plans; Chinese rocket engineers working in a one-party state are unaffected.

To move quickly, NASA has outsourced mission-critical components to private firms, including billionaire-led ventures aimed at capitalizing on the booming space economy. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are rushing to design and build Moon landers for test flights next year.

Unlike the race to reach the moon between the Soviet Union and the United States, the 21st-century competition is shaping up to be a marathon, with a massive effort to launch multiple missions over many years.

“The real telling part of this is that it doesn’t matter who goes to the moon the next 10 times,” said Scott Manley, a Scottish astrophysicist and rocket engineering expert. “The country that continues will be the country that really starts to win, the country that starts to claim space. This is very important.”

With space being a domain of opaque legal consensus, the first country to establish a presence on the resource-rich lunar surface will likely be ahead in setting the rules.

Still, the first crewed return mission would undoubtedly be a major symbolic gain as an expression of power both at home and abroad. This competitive element is regularly used by NASA, which wants to create a sense of urgency to encourage Congress to fund it. NASA chief Jared Isaacman said he said this week Stating that there is a global power competition for the “high point of space”, he added: “When there is a competition, you don’t want to lose.”

It’s a tight race: NASA plans to land in 2028, but it will likely be delayed, while Beijing plans to land by 2030, but that could come sooner. “The difference between winning and losing will be measured in months, not years,” Isaacman said.

China’s human spaceflight program was established in the 1990s but has accelerated over the past 25 years, also partnering with the military and local business. While China has never sent a taikonaut beyond low-Earth orbit, Beijing already has its own space station and, unlike NASA, has an impressive track record of adhering to its own timeline.

“Once they put a flag in the sand, they’re pretty good at setting that date,” said Manley, who is based in the US. He said China, which “dwarfs Russia in almost every respect in terms of space capabilities,” is currently pursuing a “very deliberate but not so rapid space program.”

Ten years ago, James Lewis, a former US diplomat, He testified to a committee in Congress That the USA, which won the race to the moon against the USSR, “has largely lost interest in space”, while China has accelerated its program. “We don’t want a tortoise-and-hare scenario where a slow-moving China overtakes the United States,” he said.

Over the past 10 years, NASA has revived its crewed space program named after the Greek moon goddess Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo. This culminated this month with the first crewed mission to the Moon since 1972.

At the same time, China, which named its lunar exploration missions Chang’e after the Chinese moon goddess, made tremendous progress in achieving this distance and broke other records. In 2024, China became the first country to sample the far side of the Moon with the Chang’e-6 probe. Chang’e-7 is scheduled for late 2026 to hunt for south polar water ice, a vital component for sustainable human existence.

“Overall, progress seems to be going smoothly,” said Xie Gengxin, a professor at Chongqing University and a prominent Chinese scientist who has led key experiments in Beijing’s space program. These included the groundbreaking test in 2019, when a green leaf was grown on the moon for the first time. In another experiment, a butterfly hatched in space.

Beijing regularly tests its equipment for crewed missions, which will use the Long March-10 rocket to launch spacecraft. mengzhouor “dream boat”, a space capsule with three astronauts. The nine-meter lunar lander, called Lanyue, meaning “hugging the moon,” will then lower the two people to the surface, where they’ll wander around in a new Chinese spacesuit. The Wangyu suit (“facing the cosmos”) was designed to provide greater flexibility, allowing astronauts to duck over rugged terrain.

In the US, SpaceX and Blue Origin are racing to finish their landings in time for NASA to test docking capabilities next year. Blue Origin is planning a test flight for an iteration of its Blue Moon lander in late 2026, though few details have been released about SpaceX’s 52-foot-tall lander, overshadowing other models. Neither landing is complete, raising questions about NASA’s ambitious moon landing timeline.

The hope in the scientific community is that the Moon will encourage cooperation for the benefit of all, perhaps replicating a situation like Antarctica, which operates as a neutral, science-focused zone under a 1959 treaty that bans military activities, mineral mining or new territorial claims.

But this is a period of fierce rivalry between Washington and Beijing. NASA was banned under US law from cooperating with China’s space agency in 2011, and relations have deteriorated since then.

In China, space missions are not framed as a race with the United States, but instead focus on achieving domestic goals. “We do not set a goal of comprehensively surpassing the United States,” Xie said. “This would neither be realistic nor necessary.” But he added that a human landing on the moon “will undoubtedly inspire a strong sense of national pride and satisfaction.”

Although the USA has banned cooperation with China, the European Space Agency (Esa) and some governments have not. Italy, France and Sweden sent payloads to China’s latest lunar probe Chang’e-6 mission.

Pierre-Yves Meslin, a researcher at France’s Research Institute Astrophysique et Planétologie, worked as the scientific director of the Dorn experiment, which analyzed the moon’s very thin atmosphere and was carried aboard China’s Chang’e 6 lander.

“As Europeans, we do not have the tools to go to the moon… So we rely on international partners to deliver our tools,” he said. “Mostly the United States. But now China is definitely a very serious partner.”

Working with China gave him insight into their space program. “They have a very clear, very logical, step-by-step program to get to the Moon,” he said.

He said the impact of China’s massive domestic investment in the space sector is being felt around the world. Twenty years ago, Meslin never saw so many Chinese at space science conferences, but now his halls are full of young Chinese scientists.

Meslin said that what is critical for the researcher is a reliable partner to carry the experiments into space, and said that China has proven that this is possible. “Once they decide something, the decision is made and it will be done.”