The New Moon Race: Why Most Experts Believe China Will Beat America Back to the Lunar Surface

Senator Ted Cruz was seeking a promise—a solemn, unbreakable vow. For anywhere between six and 25 years, depending on how you count the timeline, the United States and China have been locked in a new space race: a competition to become the first nation to place its citizens on the moon. At the confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s pick to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, Cruz wanted a public pledge: the U.S. would not lose.

Cruz brought an unexpected prop to last April’s hearing: a large poster of the moon. On the left side stood three astronauts beside a massive Chinese flag. On the right, two suited figures stood next to what the poster depicted as the tiniest American Stars and Stripes planted in lunar dirt. Cruz apologized for the lopsided image: “My team used ChatGPT,” explained the senator, who chairs the Senate committee that oversees NASA.

Turning more serious, Cruz pressed Isaacman: “Do we have your commitment that you will not allow the scenario on the right of this poster to happen? That China will not beat us to the moon?”

Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who has funded and completed his own private space missions, replied: “Senator, I only see the left-hand portion of that poster.”

It was a rousing, perfectly pitched crowd-pleasing response, and it is likely Isaacman meant every word. But by the time he gave that testimony, the Trump administration had already set in motion changes that gutted NASA, pushing nearly 4,000 agency employees to resign. Next, the White House proposed a massive 24% cut to NASA’s overall budget. Then Trump pulled Isaacman’s nomination entirely, replacing him with a part-time acting chief who highlighted in his official NASA bio that he is one half of “America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple.” That acting chief quickly picked a public fight with Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is building NASA’s lunar lander. Then Isaacman was back in the running. By December, Trump closed out the year with an executive order ordering Americans back to the moon by 2028.

If all that sounds chaotic and unworkable to you, you’re not alone. This deep dysfunction is one of the top reasons the vast majority of the two dozen sources I interviewed for this story believe China will land humans on the moon first. I spoke with nine former senior NASA officials who held top roles under both the Trump and Biden administrations; not a single one expressed optimism about the U.S.’s chances. “We did the worst of all possible worlds,” one of the nine officials told me. “We framed this as a race, but we never actually planned to win it.”

America’s original space program was the ultimate symbol of U.S. power at its peak. “Rocket scientist” became shorthand for genius, with many of the best based in Huntsville, Alabama—aka Rocket City. “Astronaut” was synonymous with grit, with the boldest training in Houston. “Moonshot” still stands for any audacious, nearly impossible goal. Space races have driven breakthroughs from integrated circuits to solar panels to 5G technology. But that era of American leadership in space feels long gone, as the U.S. has undermined its own advantage from within.

Today, much of the world drives Chinese electric vehicles, powers homes with Chinese solar panels, and stays connected on Chinese-built phones. Chinese researchers now outproduce American scientists in high-quality academic research, while the White House has responded by slashing U.S. science funding and charging skilled immigrant workers six-figure fees to enter the country. So if Chinese astronauts do step onto the lunar surface and stream their landing in 4K (and it is important to note this is still not a certainty), it will mean far more than just a national pride win for Beijing. It will be a public declaration that the American Century is officially over.

Roughly 18 months ago, 3,000 miles above Earth’s surface, China’s robotic Chang’e-6 spacecraft released its reentry capsule. The capsule skipped in and out of the atmosphere before parachuting down to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, carrying roughly 4 pounds of rock and soil from the moon’s far side. It was the first successful sample return from the lunar far side in human history.

Landing humans on the moon might feel like an unnecessary sequel, coming more than 50 years after the Apollo missions. But there’s a reason no human has returned in half a century: putting any craft safely on the lunar surface is incredibly difficult, even for small unmanned landers. Only a handful of soft landing missions have succeeded to date, most of them Chinese. Far more have ended in failure for programs run by Japan, Russia, Israel, the U.S., and India.

Failures stem from dozens of unforgiving factors: weak lunar gravity and uneven terrain make it easy for landers to tip over; the moon has no atmosphere, so craft have to fire rockets to slow down for landing, and that ignition kicks up enormous clouds of abrasive dust that can block visibility. “Once you start slowing down, within single-digit seconds, you’re on an intercept course with the moon, and you don’t have enough propellant to go back to lunar orbit and try again,” says Will Coogan, chief engineer at Firefly Aerospace, the only private company to ever pull off a fully successful robotic moon landing.

Operating near the lunar poles is an order of magnitude harder, according to one former leader of NASA’s lunar program. Reaching the correct orbital plane requires far more maneuvering. To maintain consistent communication with ground control, teams need to position a relay satellite in lunar orbit—something China did six weeks before the Chang’e-6 landing. Once on the surface, conditions are brutal: miles-deep craters are shrouded in near-permanent darkness, meaning no access to solar power and temperatures that drop below -200 degrees Celsius.

Yet that’s exactly where China is heading. Scientists believe the lunar poles hold massive stores of water ice, and potentially helium-3, an extremely rare isotope on Earth. Many experts believe helium-3 could unlock breakthroughs in quantum computing and even nuclear fusion. “Let’s say on the lunar surface, helium-3 becomes a new source of fusion power,” Isaacman told Cruz at that April confirmation hearing. “It could shift the balance of power here on Earth. I don’t think we can afford to find that out the hard way.”

Both the U.S. and China aim to build a permanent research base at the lunar south pole, and both are targeting the most desirable landing sites. China’s upcoming Chang’e-7 mission will aim to be the first to extract water from lunar soil. One top candidate for landing is a high ridge on Shackleton Crater near the south pole, a location that gets almost constant sunlight. Chang’e-7 will carry scientific instruments from Russia and several U.S. allies, including Italy, Switzerland, Thailand, Egypt, and Bahrain.

The China National Space Administration has scheduled the launch for August. “When they say they’re going to do something by a certain date, they almost always follow through,” says Dean Cheng, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies who has tracked China’s space progress for decades.

China’s space program is not yet as technically advanced as America’s; Beijing is only just now testing reusable rockets. And every space program faces setbacks: in November, three Chinese astronauts were stranded on their space station for nine days after orbiting debris damaged their return capsule. But China’s crewed lunar program is, for now, broadly on schedule. The plan calls for two launches: one rocket carrying the crew and service capsule, another carrying the lander. The two craft will rendezvous in lunar orbit, and two astronauts will descend to the surface. The exact landing site has not been confirmed, but testing for all core components is well underway. A spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency has confirmed the mission will launch “before 2030.”

So when will American astronauts touch down? That question is far more complicated.

To put it bluntly: the recent history of the U.S. program to return humans to the moon is so contradictory, so politicized, and so riddled with missteps that it will make your head spin. As Jim Bridenstine, Trump’s first NASA administrator, recently told Congress, “This is an architecture that no NASA administrator that I’m aware of would have selected.”

“In my opinion, this is no way to run a program,” says the senior NASA official who helped oversee the U.S. lunar initiative. “You can’t make this up. It’s truly insane.”

The original Apollo program was wildly ambitious, but it had a clear, straightforward mission design: one giant rocket carrying one small crew capsule and an even smaller landing module. The capsule would orbit the moon while the lander ferried astronauts to and from the surface. That was it. The new U.S. moon program, Artemis—named for Apollo’s twin sister—is far less organized.

For starters, the core rocket and capsule are repurposed leftovers from older programs. Back in 2010, Congress ordered NASA to build a new rocket using leftover space shuttle engines and repurpose a crew capsule from a Bush-era deep space project. The rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), would carry astronauts in the Orion capsule. The SLS-Orion combination has cost U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, and has flown exactly once. A second test flight is currently scheduled for February.

The Orion capsule was built heavier than planned to give extra radiation protection for crew, but its propulsion system was underpowered to reach a stable low lunar orbit—the ideal position for crew landings. (The European Space Agency, which built the propulsion module, said it could not afford to add more power.)

NASA engineers eventually worked out that Orion could reach a higher, super-elliptical lunar orbit that would still allow polar landings. The catch? A full orbit of the moon at that altitude takes nearly a week. Once astronauts descend to the surface, they are stuck there for days. A torn spacesuit or a life support malfunction could quickly turn into a fatal crisis.

NASA also decided it needed to build a small space station, called Gateway, in lunar orbit. I heard half a dozen different justifications for Gateway during my reporting: it can maintain communication with surface astronauts, even if it doesn’t do much to help with rescue missions, and it could provide a comfortable work and rest space for longer future missions. Or maybe not.

Some at NASA see Gateway as a political insurance policy. “There’s a belief that if you pre-position these pieces in space, we’ll have a long-term program that Congress will be less willing to walk away from,” one former senior official told me. All of this was originally supposed to come together by 2028 or 2029—until then-Vice President Mike Pence stepped to the podium.

It was spring 2019 at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center. A comically oversized American flag hung behind Pence, alongside an original Apollo-era space capsule. Pence exuded confidence, telling the crowd that “the first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil.” Out of nowhere, he announced the schedule was being cut in half: the landing would happen in five years, by 2024, timed to the end of what the Trump administration hoped would be a second term.

Everyone in the room—and across NASA—was stunned. As one former top NASA official recalled: “Everyone knew the second Pence said that that it was basically bullshit.”

When reporters pressed NASA leaders on the new deadline, “I do not like being—I will not lie,” a second former NASA official told me. “So I said, ‘I think it’s a great goal, but this is going to be hard.’ And Jim [Bridenstine] told me later, he goes, ‘The one thing you need to start learning to say is: We will be on the moon in 2024.’”

It was always a ridiculous commitment. Most of the hardware needed for the landing was still on the drawing board: NASA hadn’t even awarded contracts for the lunar lander yet. The agency’s bureaucracy is notorious for taking the maximum amount of time and the maximum number of people to make even small decisions. “You know, 20 layers of boards and councils to get to a decision, or 480 people on a call. Do we really need that?” wonders a third former senior NASA official.

What was once the poster child for American success had become a symbol of U.S. political and institutional drift. Contractors complained about NASA’s endless changing requirements and redundant safety checks; NASA officials complained about contractors understaffing projects and moving at a glacial pace; both sides complained about the White House budget office micromanaging launch dates; and everyone complained about Congress forcing them to use outdated technology they never wanted.

Even so, some at NASA welcomed the 2024 deadline. After years of drift, it at least gave the program a clear direction. Eight Artemis missions were mapped out over a decade. The first two, an uncrewed test flight of SLS and Orion and a crewed lunar flyby, were already in development. By the end of the first Trump administration, only one major piece remained for Artemis III—the historic landing mission: NASA had to award a contract to a company to design, build, and test the lander that would carry astronauts to the surface.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin positioned itself as a top contender. But as journalist Christian Davenport recounts in his book Rocket Dreams, one of Pence’s top aides told a Blue Origin executive that the company had a “Washington Post problem”—a reference to the paper’s criticism of Pence’s big space announcement. Joe Biden’s 2020 election win made that problem temporarily go away, but there was another issue: Blue Origin’s bid cost twice as much as Musk’s. (NASA and Blue Origin declined to comment for this story; SpaceX did not respond.)

SpaceX’s bid was unlike any other. The company proposed using the second stage of its still-in-development massive Starship rocket as the lander. The interior volume of the Starship lander is 150 times larger than the Apollo lunar module, according to one veteran SpaceX engineer, and larger than the interior of the International Space Station. It was absurdly big. “It’s like rowing across the Atlantic in a small rowboat and then pulling into harbor on a luxury cruise liner,” a second SpaceX veteran described it. Musk calls it a “planet-colonizer,” built to eventually carry humans to his long-term goal of Mars. That’s why his bid was so much cheaper than Blue Origin’s: he was going to build Starship anyway.

In 2021, between permanent NASA administrator appointments, NASA leadership awarded Musk a $3 billion contract for the lander. In many ways, they had little choice: the agency’s budget was already extremely tight, and if the design worked, it would revolutionize human spaceflight for decades. But competitors pushed back hard; Blue Origin sued NASA over the award. Criticism grew louder years later when the NASA official who led the contract award took a job at SpaceX.

By that point, Musk’s reputation for overpromising was well established. It quickly became clear that NASA had not fully understood the risks built into SpaceX’s bid. That information gap has set the U.S. lunar program back years.

You might be wondering at this point why it matters who gets to the moon first. The truth is, NASA and its contractors have struggled to agree on a consistent answer themselves.

Some argue a whole new lunar economy is waiting to be unlocked. Others say cislunar (the space between Earth and the moon) is a strategically critical location to spy on or defend against rival satellites. Many say exploration is a goal worth pursuing for its own sake. And anyone who’s seen any science fiction movie has felt that fleeting, undeniable thrill: there’s nothing cooler than setting foot on another world.

This mix of competing goals explains why Artemis looks the way it does: a mismatched collection of leftover 20th-century hardware and cutting-edge future technology, a blend of realpolitik and revolutionary ambition. It’s a forced marriage between veteran government contractors and billionaire visionaries chasing big dreams. On one side, you have a rocket and capsule that feel like clunky updates of the Apollo program; on the other, an interplanetary colonizer rocket and a full lunar space station. This hodgepodge is meant to support what one understated former NASA official calls a “portfolio approach” to success: if Artemis hits any of its many goals (from new lunar industries to a breakthrough technology as transformative as GPS), the whole effort will have been worth it.

Whether that makes sense to you or not, one thing is universally agreed: the U.S. and China are locked in a multi-front competition for global influence, and Beijing already has clear momentum. Imagine how much that momentum will grow after a successful lunar landing. “If you’re a country trying to choose who you want to partner with, whose team you want to be on,” asks Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington’s sharpest defense and space policy analysts, “do you want to be on the team that’s a bunch of has-beens? Or do you want to be on the team that is rapidly developing and has leapfrogged ahead of the United States?”

Last September, Bridenstine testified before Cruz’s Senate committee, warning that the U.S. plan is in real danger. He focused his remarks on Starship, the massive SpaceX craft that is supposed to carry astronauts to the lunar surface. It’s “important for the country, and it’s transformational,” Bridenstine said—if it ever works as planned. In the near term, it has made Artemis far more complicated. Starship is well behind schedule, with multiple very public test explosions. But even if it works perfectly, getting Starship to the moon requires a far more complex process than NASA realized when it awarded the contract.

A fully loaded Starship heading to the moon burns through almost all its fuel just to reach low Earth orbit. That means the Starship lander needs to refuel in orbit before it can head to the moon, requiring multiple additional launches of refueling Starships.

Starship runs on liquid oxygen and methane, which have to be kept at ultracold temperatures of -161 degrees Celsius or lower. But direct exposure to sunlight warms the craft, causing some fuel to evaporate. That could require even more refueling missions to make up the difference. In the worst case, fuel could evaporate faster than SpaceX can launch refueling missions. “That whole in-space refueling thing has never been tested,” Bridenstine added. “We’re talking about cryogenic liquid oxygen, cryogenic liquid methane being transferred in space—never been done before, and we’re going to do it dozens of times.”

NASA engineers at Johnson Space Center recently calculated that a single lunar mission could require more than 40 separate Starship launches. Refueling tests originally scheduled to begin in 2023 are now “targeted to take place in 2026,” according to SpaceX. For context: China’s entire crewed lunar