The 10th test of the SpaceX Starship has been launched and by all accounts was wildly successful in meeting its objectives. What do the results tell us about the likelihood that NASA and its commercial and international partners will beat China back to the Moon?
A recent article by Eric Berger in Ars Technica sent shockwaves through space policy circles. After taking note of several successful tests of Chinese lunar hardware, including a prototype of a crewed moon lander, plus some of the previous setbacks suffered by the SpaceX Starship, Berger has come to a sobering conclusion.
“So it’s now probable that China will ‘beat’ NASA back to the Moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.”
The conclusion is enough to ruin one’s entire decade.
Berger may be throwing in the towel too soon, but he does provide a much-needed wake up call. Sometime in the near future we might all be gathered around our television screens and watching the first people to walk on the moon since December 1972 speaking Mandarin.
The Human Landing System version of Starship is one of the two tall tent poles of the Artemis program to take Americans back to the lunar surface for the first time since December 1972. The other is the development of extravehicular activity spacesuits.
While NASA will send people around the moon with the Artemis II mission early in 2026, Artemis III cannot proceed unless the lunar lander version of Starship can take astronauts the rest of the way to the moon. A lot of things have to occur before that happens.
According to another piece in Ars Technica, those things include:
- Reuse: Developing a rapidly reusable heat shield and landing and re-flying Starship upper stages
- Prop transfer: Conducting a refueling test in low-Earth orbit to demonstrate the transfer of large amounts of propellant between Starships
- Depots: Developing and testing cryogenic propellant depots to understand heating losses over time
- Lunar landing: Landing a Starship successfully on the Moon, which is challenging due to the height of the vehicle and uneven terrain
- Lunar launch: Demonstrating the capability of Starship, using liquid propellant, to launch safely from the lunar surface without infrastructure there
- For Musk’s Mars ambitions: “Demonstrating the operation of Starship over months and the capability to perform a powered landing on Mars.”
Officially, Artemis III is scheduled to take astronauts to the lunar surface in 2027, two years from now.
SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell has assured NASA Interim Administrator Sean Duffy that the Starship Human Landing System will be ready. No independent space observer believes that a 2027 moon landing is possible now. In 2028, maybe.
Two questions present themselves. Will China beat the United States back to the moon? In the long run, will that matter?
Despite Berger’s unsettling conclusion, a Chinese victory in the second moon race is by no means certain.
With the success of its latest test flight of Starship, SpaceX could be getting its act together and will start racking up successes in advance of the Artemis III moon landing. China could stumble, with failures and setbacks that delay its own moon landing attempt.
If the Chinese land people on the moon before NASA does, the event will be a monumental embarrassment for the United States. Fingers will be pointed. Blame will be placed. The argument over “who lost the moon race” will ensure.
The answer to the last question would be everybody. Mistakes by politicians of both parties and people in the commercial sector will have contributed to a defeat in the second moon race.
Those mistakes go back decades with two stillborn attempts to start a deep space exploration program, too much focus on “space pork” over sensible technology development and the overregulation of commercial space launches.
The argument can be made that a flag and footsteps recreation of an Apollo mission by the Chinese won’t matter in the long run. If NASA and its partners press on, using the Starship and later the Blue Origin Blue Moon to establish a nuclear-powered lunar base, China’s victory will be fleeting.
In the end, the winner of the new moon race may not be who gets back there first, but who establishes a permanent presence first.
The United States and its allies have a decided advantage in Starship and its ability to move massive amounts of people and material from the Earth, to the moon, then to Mars and beyond.
Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
