Former NASA chief sounds alarm on China's lunar "exploration" plans

The reason, Nelson says, is that China’s space program is militarized and highly secretive. “China is not a partner to be trusted,” he writes. “Partnership requires trust, and trust is founded on transparency. With China, despite repeated efforts to build verifiable, rules-based cooperation and set commonsense guard rails for engagement, there has never been much of either.” The flashpoint of the near future is the Moon, where both NASA and China are in a contest to not just land humans but also establish a long-term settlement. As for how this competition is going, Nelson writes, “America is not the obvious favorite.” Although he’s no fan of the Trump administration, Nelson does seem to agree with NASA’s current administrator, Jared Isaacman, that this competition is urgent and requires the agency to pursue more than a flags-and-footprints approach. In his 10 months as administrator, Isaacman’s signature initiative has been to launch an effort across NASA and its commercial space ecosystem to build a Moon Base at the lunar South Pole. “When you realize there are only limited parking spots that get us access to that training environment, it creates an urgency, and we must [go fast] because the Chinese are going to the exact same locations,” Isaacman said. “They are partnered with the Russians. They are going to put a nuclear reactor there, and they could potentially deny this training environment that is a necessity for America’s space ambitions.” Under Isaacman, NASA is eyeing a 2028 launch date for the Artemis IV mission to land humans on the Moon. Critics have suggested that the agency is motivated primarily by politics due to the influence of the Trump administration, which will exit the White House at the end of 2028. The reality, however, appears to be that Isaacman does not want to cede any more time in this race and is thus pushing for as many cargo and crew missions as possible to the Moon as soon as possible. At the outset of the Biden administration in January 2021, NASA was still targeting a 2024 lunar landing, even though this was widely seen as unreasonable. Over the next four years, the target date for a landing slipped almost year for year. If the date slips significantly further, China will land humans on the Moon before NASA can return there. Being first, and being there for the long haul, matters, Nelson says. And he tells his readers to not be fooled by talk of exploration, especially when it comes to China’s space program. This is a competition for the high ground of the 21st century. “What looks like exploration on the surface is, in truth, also a raging struggle for space supremacy,” he writes. “This race will determine who sets the rules for a new era of human expansion beyond Earth. For Beijing, this race is not about exploration but about domination, securing the infrastructure of orbit in much the same way empires once seized trade routes and aggressively defended sea lanes.” Should the United States lose this competition, Nelson writes, “we’ll watch the next frontier slip from our grasp.”