Trump declared a space race with China. The United States is losing

The senator wanted a promise. A solemn vow. For the past six years — or perhaps the past decade or quarter century, depending on how you count things — the United States and China have been engaged in a space race, a competition to see which nation could put its people on deck. moon. Sen. Ted Cruz wanted President Donald Trump’s nominee to head NASA, Jared Isaacman, to pledge that the United States would not lose.

Cruz brought a little surprise to Isaacman’s confirmation hearing last April. It was a poster of the moon. On one side were three astronauts and a giant Chinese flag. On the other, two more figures in spacesuits, with the smallest stars and stripes planted in the field. lunar soil. Cruz apologized for the imbalance. “My team used ChatGPT,” explained the senator, who chairs the committee that oversees NASA.

Then Cruz, with a little more seriousness, asked Isaacman: “Do you have your commitment that we 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 had financed his own space missions, responded: “Senator, I only see the left side of this poster. »

It was a red meat response, hell yeah, perfect. And perhaps Isaacman thought so. But at the time of his testimony, the Trump administration had begun a process that would allow devastate NASApushing nearly 4,000 agency employees to resign. The White House then proposed a massive 24% cut to NASA’s budget. Then Trump withdrew Isaacman’s nomination and appointed a new part-time acting chief, a man who boasted in his official NASA biography of being one half of “America’s first and oldest reality TV couple.” And then this guy fought with Elon Muskwhich is building NASA’s lunar lander. And Isaacman was back in contention. In December, Trump closed out the year with an executive order requiring Americans to return to the Moon by 2028.

If this all sounds suboptimal, welcome to the club, space ranger. This dysfunction is one of many reasons why the vast majority of the two dozen sources I interviewed for this article believe China will put people on the Moon first. I spoke with nine former NASA officials who served at the highest levels of the space agency under Presidents Trump and Biden; none of them were optimistic about America’s chances. “We have made the worst of all worlds,” one of the nine told me. “We positioned it as a race with no intention of winning.”

The original space program was the ultimate symbol of America at its peak. Rocket scientist was shorthand for brilliant, and many of them worked in Huntsville, Alabama, aka Rocket City. The word astronaut was synonymous with courage, and the bravest of them could be found in Houston. Moon shot was (and is) code for something borderline impossible. Space races have helped spur the development of everything from integrated circuits to solar panels to 5G. But that was before America decided to stab itself in the brain.

Today, much of the world drives Chinese electric carssupplies their home with Chinese solar panelsand stays in touch with phones made in China. Chinese scientists have eclipsed their American counterparts in producing high-quality research, and the White House responded by cutting American scientific funding and charging $100,000 to let in highly skilled immigrants. So if Chinese astronauts step off their lander and broadcast the results live in 4K – and to be clear, that’s still an “if” at this point – it will be more than a cause for national pride for Beijing. It will be a declaration that the American century is officially over.