NASA’s Moon Race With China Needs a Better Plan
The US strategy for a lunar return is stuck in the past.
Fly me to the moon.
Photographer: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
There’s bipartisan agreement that the US needs to be the first country to establish a permanent base on the moon. This is crucial because failure to do so would be a watershed moment in history when China proves its top-down, authoritarian government can muster resources more effectively and efficiently than the creativity unleashed by a messy democracy.
The stakes in this second space race are just as high or even higher than in the 1960s, when the US and Russia were going toe-to-toe developing more powerful missiles and beginning the era of satellite communications. There’s an argument that the stakes are even higher in this space race 2.0 because the competitor is much more formidable. China has 10 times Russia’s population, but the real power lies in its economic prowess after it shifted toward a market economy with Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door policy in the late 1970s.