As Artemis II hurtles home, a US-China space race accelerates
America is hit by the moon again.
With the return of Artemis II and its four crew members to Earth after a record-breaking and visually spectacular voyage around the Moon, America’s love affair with lunar exploration has been renewed.
Something else from that era may also have been renewed. In 1960s punch-counter-fist style, a rival nation’s answer to Artemis could arrive in just a few months. In the second half of this year, the China National Space Administration is expected to launch Chang’e 7, an uncrewed mission that, if successful, would be the country’s second successful landing on the lunar south pole. (In 2023, India became the first country to land in this resource-rich region.)
Why we wrote this
The United States and China are leading a global competition to establish a permanent presence on the Moon. Scientific research, national pride and potentially lucrative lunar mining operations are at stake.
NASA hopes to beat the Chinese again in 2028, when it plans to return humans to the lunar surface on Artemis IV.
Experts say it has all the hallmarks of a space race, but it differs in important ways from the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. Among them: China and the United States not only want to return to the lunar surface, but also establish a permanent presence there. And unlike the 1960s, there are more than two players in the space sector.
Slow and steady progress over two decades currently puts China in the lead, experts say, but with NASA’s announcement last month of a new plan to build a lunar base in the early 2030s, the United States has the capacity — and a renewed focus — to once again take the lead in lunar exploration. Both countries have ambitious goals, and with human operations on the Moon unprecedented and challenging, this race is expected to last more than a decade. If the first space race was a rocket-powered roller coaster, this one might be closer to the Iditarod.
“If the finish line is for the Moon to become a site of regular, sustained human activity, we are still quite early in that race,” says David Burbach, director of the Space Studies Group at the US Naval War College, speaking on his personal behalf.
Chang’e in China
In 1970, China launched its first satellite into orbit. It would be 30 years before the Chinese government began studying a mission to the Moon. Then, in 2007, the Chang’e 1 probe launched towards the Moon.
The China National Space Administration has since carried out five more Chang’e missions – named after the Chinese moon goddess – and they have all been successful. The missions delivered two rovers to the lunar surface, Yutu 1 and Yutu 2. The second rover is still operational after arriving with Chang’e 4 in January 2019.
Amid these successes on the Moon, Chinese astronauts, called the taikonauts, have regularly set new milestones. Their first manned flight into space took place in 2003, and in 2008, their first spacewalk. The agency’s Tiangong space station has been operational since 2022.
China’s space agency doesn’t share much information, but it appears it hasn’t had any major setbacks or failures, Dr. Burbach says.
“They tried very ambitious things and they all succeeded on the first try,” he adds.
China has now proposed building a permanent base on the lunar south pole – a region considered rich in water ice, a resource chemically different from ice on Earth that could be used to make propellant and support locals. The China National Space Administration signed a memorandum of understanding with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, in 2021, pledging to jointly build the International Lunar Research Station.
Described as a “comprehensive scientific experiment base with long-term autonomous operation capability,” the station, according to China, will be “open to all interested countries and international partners.” At least 12 countries are said to have joined the project, including Venezuela, Egypt and Pakistan. Separately, India aims to land its own crewed mission on the Moon by 2040 and has signed an agreement with Japan to explore the lunar south pole.
China’s space agency wants to build a robotic base by 2035, followed by a base capable of accommodating human inhabitants by 2045. The Chang’e 7 mission is seen as the first step in this process.
China has a significant advantage over the United States, experts note. The country’s slow and steady progress is aided by its autocratic government, which can finance the lunar program as it sees fit without having to worry about public opinion or a change in administration.
“They’re working on a more spaced-out schedule,” says Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation, a private nonprofit focused on promoting peaceful uses of outer space.
“OUR [timeline] continues to move to the right, while that of China has more or less remained at 2030.”
New direction at NASA
At the end of March, NASA announced that it was accelerating its lunar exploration program.
The Moon had been a secondary concern of American spaceflight for half a century. The space race was won and NASA turned its attention to reusability and international collaboration through the Space Shuttle program and the International Space Station.
For decades, presidents have reversed NASA’s priorities. George W. Bush proposed sending crewed missions to the Moon and establishing a base there, as a springboard for Mars exploration. Barack Obama canceled that effort and focused on sending humans to Mars by 2030. Early in his first term, Donald Trump created the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon.
Yet Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight orbiting the Moon, didn’t launch until 2022. While a race against China is likely to focus minds — and open the purse strings — in Congress, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced changes to speed things up.
“Time is of the essence in this great power competition, and success or failure will be measured in months, not years,” Isaacman said on March 24. NASA, he added, should “focus [its] extraordinary resources.
The changes – announced on the eve of the launch of Artemis II – are spectacular. The agency suspended work on Lunar Gateway, a multinational space station intended to replace the International Space Station, to focus on a lunar base. The Artemis III mission was scaled back and moved to 2027 instead of 2028. Artemis IV aims to land humans on the Moon in 2028.
Overall, NASA wants to increase its launch cadence from one launch every three years to one launch every 10 months. The new $20 billion plan hopes to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon by the 2030s.
A long way to go
In this sense, this new space race – or space marathon – is about determining who can build a lunar base first. The competition “is ultimately about who will control the lunar surface,” says Norbert Schorghofer, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, in an email.
“Whoever controls access to the lunar surface and lunar resources will, for all intents and purposes, own the moon,” he adds.
Geopolitics is another uncertainty. Whoever establishes a stronger presence could take the lead in establishing rules for lunar operations, including exploitation of the Moon’s potentially billion-dollar resources. The United States and China are signatories to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which stipulates that no nation can possess a planetary body, but how the agreement would be enforced remains unclear. Another complication is the efforts of private companies to establish operations on the Moon.
Center for the Operation of Ground Space Infrastructure-Roscosmos State Space Corporation/AP/File
NASA views the Artemis Accords, developed with the State Department in 2020, as a key effort to establish “a common set of principles” for the latest era of space exploration. The document explicitly allows mining of celestial bodies and sets standards for resource extraction, space debris, and scientific data sharing, among other topics. Sixty-one countries signed the agreement in January. Two notable exceptions: China and Russia.
But there is a long way to go. If the United States and China are engaged in a metaphorical space marathon, they are both currently in the first mile, experts say. That’s a lifetime in geopolitics, and in the hostile environment of the Moon, both countries could face more serious problems than the other.
“At the very least, the Moon is a very difficult environment to keep people alive,” says Samson.
“China will follow the same laws of thermodynamics on the Moon as we do,” she adds. “So there’s no reason why they wouldn’t want to coordinate with us on lunar missions.”
