China Hawks in Space
The current space race is an extension of the battle for economic and geopolitical hegemony being carried out by private entities more concerned with stock prices than with technological advancement.
On November 13, 2025, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, not only successfully launched its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, but recovered its first stage rocket 375 miles downrange from the launch site. This had been the norm at SpaceX, which had achieved reusability almost a decade ago. The US government had awaited a launch competitor for SpaceX to emerge, and with Blue Origin having achieved reusability, a contender appeared to be on the horizon.
More recently, on April 1, 2026 NASA launched Artemis II, a ten-day crewed trip that looped around the moon. NASA administrator Jarred Isaacman proclaimed, “Artemis II will be a momentous step forward for human spaceflight.” Artemis II broke the distance record formerly held by the infamous Apollo 13, at one point reaching a recorded distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, besting Apollo 13 by 4111 miles.
With all of this good news, things appear to be on the upside for US space prospects. Yet nothing happens in a vacuum. Back in the fall, then NASA administrator Sean Duffy spent a good amount of his time giving speeches with a singular message: “We are going to beat the Chinese to the moon.” The urgency of that sentiment may be unclear—after all, NASA first landed astronauts on the Moon back in 1969 and five more times after that (Gene Cernan was the last person to step off the lunar surface on December 14, 1972). That race ended long ago. Politics and budget cuts scrapped the remaining planned Apollo missions.
The difference between now and then is that the race is now about more than geopolitical prestige. The plan is now to get to the moon and stay there. If the Apollo landings targeted the region around the Moon’s equator, the current target is the Moon’s southern pole where there is an abundance of frozen water, along with some amount of rare isotopes such as Helium-3 (on most of the Moon the brutal heat of a lunar day doesn’t give ice much of a chance; hence the focus on the permanently sheltered poles). The idea is that water can be used for hydration and be split into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel for further missions. Helium-3 is currently used for medical imaging, but one day it could possibly be the fuel of fusion reactors. It remains to be seen how any of these resources will be exploited. Doing things in space is quite difficult, but the China hawks want to get a head start.
And many of them are getting quite nervous about this. China is targeting 2030 for a moon landing. Former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe was quoted regarding China: “There is no question that the technology they have is verging very close to being in competition with us. Two years ago, I would not have said that, but they are really improving to the point [the 2030] objective is conceivable.” Last September, another former NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstein, was more blunt: “Unless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China’s projected timeline to the Moon’s surface.” More recently, Issacman put it this way: “They may be early. And recent history suggests we might be late.”
In May 2024, then NASA chief Bill Nelson stated that the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to moon. In an interview with NPR, Nelson stated:
I don’t want them to get to the South Pole, which is a limited area we think the water is. It’s pockmarked with Craters. And there are limited areas that you can land on the South Pole. I don’t want them to get there and say “this is ours. You stay out.”
Taking this line further, testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee in December 2023, Dr. Greg Autry (coauthor of Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier) and Professor Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at Ole Miss, were asked by Congressman Mike Collins: “What is the worst-case scenario if China wins the race for space mining, and how will that impact the United States?” Their answers?
Dr. Autry: I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but if China wins the race in space, we’ve ceded the entire strategic high ground militarily and ceded the entire economic future, and the United States will be relegated to the backwater position for the rest of human history.
Prof. Hanlon: I agree with Dr. Autry. The Chinese will have the opportunity to block our access not just to the moon but to all of space, and humanity’s future lies in space.
China became the third country capable of human spaceflight in October 2003 and wouldn’t take its first steps into deep space until 2007. In June 2024, China, with its Chang’e 6 probe, became the first nation to land and bring back samples from the far side of the Moon. This past December, Landspace, a leading Chinese private space-launch company, became the first non-American company to attempt to return a rocket stage to Earth for reuse with its Zhuque-3 rocket. The test ended in a grand explosion, but it won’t be too long before reusability is achieved in China. Established commercial Chinese firms, including Space Pioneer, iSpace, Galactic Energy, CAS Space, and Deep Blue Aerospace, are close to getting their own reusable rockets to the pad.
Meanwhile, the US space program post-Apollo is a story of indecision and bloat. The shuttle era ended on February 1, 2003, after the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere. With the eventual retirement of the Space Shuttle, NASA became entirely dependent on paying for rides on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station. Each incoming president has had a different and often contradictory vision for NASA, preventing the formulation of a coherent space policy.
The roots of the current Artemis program go back to the Obama administration. The Constellation program, tasked with redeveloping moon-landing technology, was a mess from day one, and Obama sought to scrap it. But Congress, under the lobbying from legacy contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, wasn’t having it. In 2011, Congress preserved part of Constellation, which became the Space Launch System (SLS). The problem: a 2023 report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed that SLS totaled $23.8 billion in expenses since 2012, resulting in a dizzying $4.4 billion cost per launch!
By the 2020s, when SLS finally launched Artemis I, Space X had emerged to reestablish launch capability from the US. Space X was chosen as a contractor, but the key to its plan to get back to the Moon relies on an orbital refueling technology that has never before been successfully deployed. As Bridenstine put it in his testimony to Congress: “By the way, that whole in space refueling thing has never been tested either. We are talking about cryogenic liquid oxygen and cryogenic liquid methane being transferred in space, never been done before, and we’re going to do it dozens of times, and then we’re going to have a human rated Starship that is refueled that goes all the way to the Moon.” Artemis III was originally scheduled to be the first to land astronauts on the lunar surface. This has now been pushed back to Artemis IV, with the plan to eventually send two missions a year. In late March, NASA announced plans to spend $20 billion for a moon base to be built over the next seven years.
Whereas the first space race was carried out by states to the end of national prestige, the current race back to the Moon is a much more literal extension of this-worldly battle for economic and geopolitical hegemony, but it is today being carried out by private entities more concerned with their stock price than the feasibility of the technology being deployed. In the mid-1960s, NASA consumed 4.41 percent of the US federal budget. Now, with all these visions for space flying around, NASA gets 0.5 percent.
Still, with all of these private entities pushing their extra-planetary endeavors, and China hawks dominating both sides of the aisle, it’s not hard to see the seeds of conflict blossoming in the barren soil of space. In 2019, NATO added “space” to land, sea, air, and cyberspace as an operational domain, and in 2021 established a space center at its Air Command in Ramstein, Germany. 2019 was also the year the US officially established its Space Force. In November 2021, Russia launched a missile from Earth’s surface that destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite (the satellite had been in orbit since 1982), creating 1500 pieces of orbital debris. Both China, in 2007 using a kinetic kill weapon, and the US, with a missile against a malfunctioning spy satellite at a lower orbit, have also destroyed satellites. India too conducted a kinetic anti-satellite test in 2019. In the gameified and human-less reaches of space, it is not difficult to imagine what could happen when all these countries meet each other on the lunar surface.
Joseph Grosso is a writer and librarian in New York City and the author of Emerald City: How Capital Transformed New York (ZER0 Books). His writings have appeared in various publications including Quillette, Compact, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, Science for the People, and Counterpunch and he can be found on Substack.