US ‘on schedule’ in race with China to land men on Moon, NASA chief says

“It has been rightly pointed out to me in my comments that we are in a space race with the Chinese and that they are very good,” he said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “Especially in the last 10 years, they’ve had a lot of success. They usually say what they mean and follow through on what they say.”

But despite China’s many achievements in space — which include an occupied space station in low Earth orbit and the landing of a rover on Mars in 2021 — the United States remains on track to return astronauts to lunar surface ahead of its main rival, Nelson said.

NASA plans to one day build a permanent presence at the hottest real estate in the solar system: the lunar south pole. In a key step toward that goal, NASA aims to fly four astronauts around the moon late next year and then land humans on the surface in late 2026 for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

“I think we’re right on schedule,” Nelson said.

However, that schedule has been pushed back several times due to technical challenges, including an effort to better understand the performance of the capsule’s heat shield intended to fly astronauts to and from the Moon’s vicinity. During a test flyby around the moon in 2022 with no one on board, the heat shield of NASA’s Orion spacecraft “ablated differently than expected” in more than 100 places as it plunged through the atmosphere, according to a report released in spring from NASA. inspector general. In some places, it looked like pieces were torn off, leaving gashes like pits in the material.

“If the same problem occurs on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew,” the report concluded.

NASA’s plan to return humans to the surface is a complicated one that requires Orion to orbit the moon and then a special spacecraft — SpaceX’s Starship — to transport them. on the lunar surface. Starship would then return the astronauts to rendezvous with Orion in lunar orbit for the return trip to Earth.

Given Starship’s important role for landing on the surface, NASA is closely watching its development. SpaceX recently conducted the fourth test flight of the massive vehicle, the largest and most powerful ever built, flying it most of the way around the globe in what the company said was a largely successful flight that will allow him to continue to develop it rapidly.

Nelson said that “a good indicator of” NASA’s ability to get to the Moon before China “was SpaceX’s success on their last Starship flight.” But Elon Musk’s company still needs to demonstrate that the vehicle can be refueled in Earth orbit by a fleet of tankers, fly people safely and land softly on the moon – all very ambitious., complex tasks that can take years to accomplish.

Both the US and China eventually intend to set up camps near the moon’s south pole, where there is water in the form of ice in its permanently shadowed craters. Not only is water vital to sustaining life, but its constituent parts, oxygen and hydrogen, can also be used as rocket fuel, allowing further exploration into the solar system.

Despite the competition between the US and China, the two countries will have to find a way to coexist on and around the moon, Nelson said. The space programs of both countries are also linked, he said, by threats in space.

US officials have said Russia is developing a nuclear weapon that could be used in Earth orbit to destroy satellites and cripple key US national security infrastructure used for missile warnings, detection and to guide precision munitions. among others. Russia has denied that it intends to put a nuclear weapon in space.

Still, it should concern all nations with assets in space, Nelson said, and especially China, which operates not only a growing number of spacecraft that could be disabled by a nuclear blast, but also a manned space station.

Speaking publicly about the threat for the first time, he said: “All nations should be concerned that Russia may be aiming to put a nuclear weapon in orbit. Such a capability could pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the globe, as well as to the vital communications, scientific, meteorological, agricultural, commercial and national security services on which we all depend.”

He added that “this is an opening for the Chinese government, whose astronauts and Chinese space station would be threatened by the deployment of a Russian nuclear bomb in space. … They have an interest in Russia not deploying nuclear weapons. This is how they would use their position with Russia and the relationship between them [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin urge the Russians to rethink this?”

An installation of a nuclear weapon in orbit would be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. And as China and Russia continue to rival the US in space, NASA and the State Department have sought to lead an international coalition in growth under what is known as the Artemis Agreement, perhaps the most significant international space policy effort since the 1967 treaty.

In an effort to put pressure on China’s space program, which Nelson and others have criticized as operating covertly and as an arm of the military, signatories to the accord agree to abide by accepted norms of behavior in space and in and around the moon. Countries will be required to share scientific discoveries, for example, and detail where they are operating on the lunar surface and what they are doing.

Meanwhile, NASA’s lunar campaign continues. This year, the space agency hopes one of its commercial partners, Intuitive Machines, a Houston company, will land its second uncrewed spacecraft on the moon, with more privately developed landers to follow in the coming years. the following. Earlier this year, its spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle to land on the moon and the first American spacecraft to touch down gently since the Apollo era.

But for all the talk of a space race with China, astronauts who are part of the Artemis mission planned to fly around the moon in 2025 said they don’t see it that way.

The flight commander, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, said during a recent Washington Post Live event that, “We don’t think this is a race. We think this is just the right direction for exploration, and this is the direction which we are going to.”

He added: “But as an American, I feel there is pressure to build.”