On Friday, a Long March 5 rocket launched China’s newest and most ambitious mission to the Moon. The second stage burn occurred 12 minutes into flight. A translunar injection burn occurred about 15 minutes later. The Chang’e 6 spacecraft then separated and is now on its way to the Moon. While the Moon has turned out to be a very difficult target for many nations and commercial ventures, China’s state-run program has continued to push the boundaries of robotic lunar exploration. They have had a series of successful missions including orbiters, landers, and rovers. Chang’e 5 even returned lunar samples to Earth, a task that NASA’s Mars program is finding very difficult to execute on time and budget, albeit at a more challenging destination. Chang’e 6 will repeat the sample return this time from the far side of the Moon and in a resource-rich area of its southern polar regions.
The bottom line is that China is now a near-peer competitor to the U.S. in a particularly critical and notoriously difficult area of space technology. There is no more pretending that the U.S. has a safe and commanding lead in this category or really in any other aspect of space exploration or defense. We should assume China’s planned human landings on the Moon will occur in 2030 as stated and that they will indeed build a permanently occupied International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in cooperation with Russia and a selection of authoritarian-friendly nations.
Not all of China’s space efforts are focused on science or on exploration. There is a serious race to the Moon in a quest for mineral resources and China is sending us a message with this mission. Chang’e 6 will land in the resource-rich South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin. Specifically, China is targeting a crater called “Apollo” which is named in honor of America’s great lunar achievement. Apollo’s interior and adjacent craters are named for Apollo astronauts and memorialize deceased NASA employees including the lost crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Chang’e 6 will literally raise a communist Chinese flag there. The Chinese are extremely careful with protocol, any small slight is intentional.
Beyond geopolitical messaging, the outcomes of space race 2.0 matter in concrete terms. In my testimony to the House Natural Resources Committee last December, I described the importance of lunar resources to our future in space and on Earth:
It is important to note that this bright future only materializes for everyone if America takes the lead and space minerals are extracted and sold by private actors in a free market. We should not expect Chinese state-controlled exploitation of the Aitken Basin mascon or the asteroid Eros to play out any differently than their terrestrial rare-earth monopoly or territorial aggression in the South China Sea have.
A number or people have commented on this aggressive competition. I’ve written a new book on Space Race 2.0 entitled, Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier. In the introduction to Red Moon Rising, Doug Loverro writes:
The story of why space matters in the contest between the U.S. and China extends beyond warfare. As you’ll discover in Red Moon Rising, it’s an economic story, a resources story, a technology leadership story, an energy independence story, and perhaps most importantly, an international prestige story.
Loverro knows which way is up, literally. A career U.S. Air Force officer he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy during the Obama Administration and lead NASA’s Human Space Exploration under President Trump. Resource competition has historically driven military competition and Loverro goes on to note:
Today, the range of demonstrated Chinese operational and test space weaponry is impressive and growing, and you’ll learn some frightening things about them in this book. This threat inspired a bipartisan group of U.S. space strategists and leaders (including both myself and Dr. Autry) to push for the creation of a U.S. Space Force, which was finally stood up under the Trump administration. Good but perhaps too late given the speed and boldness of China’s aggressive space warfare posture.
The good news is that, as long as conflict can be avoided, competition is a good thing. Space technology leapt from a beeping little ball, called Sputnik, to the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in just 12 short years (1957-1969)! After the U.S. and Soviets made nice with 1975’s “handshake in space” America’s ambition for deep space exploration evaporated and we spent a half century in Low Earth Orbit. As I wrote in Red Moon Rising:
After decades stuck in LEO, the threat of competition with China for influence and economic development on the Moon has awoken our spirit of exploration and shifted American space policy out of low Earth orbit. President Trump was probably the first American president to clearly understand the nature of China as a rapacious global competitor, and we were proud to be part of the team that advised him to return America to the Moon, where China is clearly aiming to secure strategic resources.
The good news is that the Biden space team has continued all the Trump era programs including Space Force and NASA’s Artemis Moon program. Importantly the Artemis Accords have expanded from 8 to 39 nations, dwarfing China’s ILRS coalition. America appears poised to accept China’s lunar challenge, and perhaps even channel the not-so-subtle slight of their landing site selection into a new determination to go farther and do more. Space Race 2.0 promises benefits to everyone on Earth.
