Secretly (?) I'm hoping for another "space race"— this time between the U.S. and China. I'm hoping this for the U.S.'s sake. I'm hoping that good can come of it.
All it would take to revolutionise things is for SpaceX to open source all their engineering designs, and let the Germans and the Chinese build the things.
You know the Chinese government is more in debt than the United States, right? It's structured differently, but that doesn't change much. Or is worse, because you can end up with the government backing/cosigning for government joint ventures in the same industries all over the nation (for example EVs).
I can't help but wonder about why countries are doing this. Launch detection? Cameras? Other secret use? Making money for commercial sats? (Starlink, maybe GPS-equivalent, other?)
I hope they become better at injecting payloads into low orbit. The higher orbits Chinese companies use for internet constellations right now have huge risks of space debris, since satellites will take hundreds of years to fall out of orbit.
It's true they're using much higher LEO orbits—not sure why you were downvoted for this basic and relevant fact. While Starlink goes to 500-600 km altitudes, Qianfan seems to target 800 km[a], and Guowang has been launching to 900 km and 1,145 km [b,c]. (I'm not discussing the few Starlinks in VLEO orbits below 300 km, because I don't know what the concrete plans are with those).
Those are orbits with 100+ year dynamic lifetimes (as is regularly discussed, i.e. ref [d]). It's true that they could actively deorbit them; that's the lifespan of passive debris that fails to actively deorbit. (Ref [d] also discusses spent rocket stages in this context, and China's uniquely bad behavior there).
I assume the main motive behind this is basic business economics. China doesn't have reusable boosters; the ones that might succeed this month won't reach Falcon 9 levels of mass production, and launch cadence, for several years. They're on an expensive on-ramp. To a first-order simplification 1,100 km orbits need only 1/4th as many satellites for the same coverage as 550 km orbits.
The practical part of space flight is launching satellites, and weapons. Both countries are already doing both.
If we're discussing manned missions to the moon or Mars, as an American I'd prefer China spent all the money and the US didn't bother. It'd be cool to see it happen, but no one can identify practical benefits, aside from a political win.
You are missing that the money and research into figuring out how to solve many engineering and scientific challenges related to the missions had tremendous benefit to industry later.
As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important
It's not clear that concentrating so much money on a single government project fosters more benefit than having the money go to a variety of other projects. It is easy to see the items developed by something like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program, but we often miss the innovations created by private industry when you compare a similar total spend (Bastiat's "seen and unseen"). One example of the alternative is how (private) demand for cellular telephony has triggered many innovations, from powerful and efficient microcontrollers to bright LCD screens, and fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.
If you want to do research to benefit industry, you can just do so. There's no particular reason research funding tied to human space flight should get better results.
I'm thinking that Apollo covered 90% of the useful spin-offs from developing tech for manned travel to the moon or Mars. And at least 90% of what's left was either covered by the ISS, or could be covered by a few small LEO space stations.
The economic cases for manned moon or Mars programs look really iffy these days. The US has poured tens of $billions down the SLS rat hole, with very little to show for it. And Wienersmith's A City on Mars is a pretty damning dissection of the whole concept of Martian colonies.
The SLS is widely understood to be less about research and development, and more about pork barreling, and jobs program. I don't buy that humanity should avoid investing in space travel because US Congress and surrounding governmental beaurcracy is not running projects effectively. That argument would stop just about any human activity.
It's pretty difficult to predict what spinoffs would come from attempting to put a colony on Mars. I would imagine to succeed we would need to solve a lot of challenges with human biology, genetic engineering, automation, and many novel engineering solutions.
But economics is not the only reason to do things, and I bet you don't expect everything humans do to have a purely economic rational.
A Far Side lunar base is not some cool sci fi brag. It is a massive strategic advantage, and brushing it off misses everything that actually matters.
The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception. The Moon itself becomes a giant wall of rock that blocks sensors, lasers, and signals. It is the closest thing to perfect concealment anyone is ever going to get in space.
From that position, gravity is on your side. Sending kinetic weapons toward Earth takes almost no energy. Sending anything from Earth to the Moon takes a huge amount of fuel just to fight the gravity well. The attacker on the surface is always at a disadvantage, and the lunar side barely has to spend anything to strike.
A base on the Moon also survives whatever happens on Earth. Even a full scale nuclear exchange leaves it untouched. That means guaranteed retaliation. It becomes a true third strike platform, something no one can wipe out in a first strike. It locks in deterrence in a way that completely changes the strategic balance.
And if one country gets there first, mutual deterrence is over. They hold an untargetable, unreachable launch point that the rest of the planet cannot neutralize. That is not a symbolic win. It is unilateral control over the highest ground humanity has access to.
I honestly do not know why some people do not see it. This is literally rewriting Earth geopolitics. For hundreds of years we worked within Mackinder’s logic:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; who rules the World Island commands the World.
With a lunar base it becomes:
Who rules the Moon commands cislunar space; who commands cislunar space commands Earth orbit; who commands Earth orbit commands the Earth.
This is not about pride or prestige. It is about who controls the one location in the solar system that offers absolute strategic dominance. Whoever controls the Moon controls the high ground.
Good luck competing with China if they get there first.
EDIT: Apparently posting six comments in thirty minutes counts as "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
" and whoever decided that is a proper knob. I got throttled again, so if you reply, I can't respond anymore for now.
Disagree on the technical aspects. It'd be inexpensive to monitor adversary military activities on the lunar far side: one lunar satellite would do it. The gravity well is not trivial, and any launches from the surface (should this become a thing) would be immediately visible from high orbit, by the intense infrared glow of rocket combustion exhaust. (Exact same way nuclear early warning systems work on Earth, for that matter[0]).
Agree that the general concept is a serious one, but I don't think the numbers work out on your specific implementation.
> The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception.
What prevents someone from sending a Lunar-orbiting imaging satellite to image everything on the Far Side? The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has already been imaging the Far Side for over a decade.
I agree with your general points about it being a difficult location to get to, but if it's possible to put regular satellites in Lunar orbit, surely its possible to park some warheads too just in case...
If a big power gets there first, they’re not going to treat lunar orbit like some kind of shared international space. They’d treat it as their turf. At that point you can’t just assume you can drop an imaging satellite into whatever orbit you want they’d have both the motive and the capability to deny access.
You open by calling me a bot, which is an odd way to start a serious argument.
It isn’t about extra ways to blow things up. It’s about survivability and leverage.
A platform you can’t detect or preempt changes deterrence dynamics, just like subs do.
The advantage comes from being untargetable, not from adding more warheads.
That Far Side base is irrelevant unless is can be supplied, at scale. Talk to a few folks who served in Afghanistan about the costs and miseries of long logistical pipelines to great-in-theory locations.
Then, the base has to easily project serious military power to places that matter to us. Lunar escape velocity is ~2.4km/s, which is not trivial. After that, transit time to Earth is multiple days. Vs. current ICBM's can put nuclear warheads anywhere, in under an hour, without actually achieving LEO.
BTW - if nation C can haul enough stuff to the Far Side to build a substantial base, then obviously it's neither untargetable nor unreachable for nation U.
"If a thing which is remote and in the future takes the characteristic of being done first by my adversary then the mostly likely outcome is a marvel universe dystopia endgame where everything we do is fruitless and they win and we lose"
Look, I get you don't think you wrote hyperbole, but you did. Getting to a strategic capability based on far side occupancy and assuming that automatically is non competitive and incurs first to file wins outcome.. please. The most likely outcome is an antarctica treaty. The next most likely outcome is broadly speaking comparable capabilities and MAD.
By all means wargame your own vision where China does it solo and nobody else can compete.
I'm not talking about planting a flag and saying "dibs." I'm talking about the first country that reaches actual sustained capability, moving mass, building infrastructure, supplying it, and controlling the surrounding space. Whoever gets there first shapes the rules, because that's how every strategic domain has worked so far!
That's why "just let China have the Moon" doesn't really hold up. These places are only neutral when no one has the power to enforce anything. Once a country can build, maintain, and defend a Far Side installation, the incentives shift. If multiple nations reach that level around the same time, fine, you get something like MAD. But if one gets there years ahead of everyone else, it's not going to look like Antarctica, it's going to look like someone taking the high ground before anyone else can contest it.
Seems like every month there is ~30 launches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...), November has mostly US and China, but also have (or will have) India, Turkey, Japan, Russia and Italy as countries with launches. Pretty great to see that more nations are getting involved.
Randomly, I stumbled upon the Shijian series of satellites, apparently featuring an arm that could tow other satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian
We've lost the shipbuilding race, auto race, drone race, without anyone in DC actually noticing. Most Americans don't even realize China has a manned space station. If China had a presence on the moon, would that wake up congress, or would they just put out a few tweets and go back to cultural dramatics?
(Maybe you are just joking, but I wonder about the idea.)
When I was a kid, it was a general assumption in science fiction that living in zero-G or low-G would provide health/longevity benefits. Our experience with the ISS shows that microgravity is bad for health (muscle atrophy, bone loss, vision problems). It is not clear that low gravity would be much different.
Honestly I doubt it. Current government doesn't really have the ability to get their shit together and compete with anyone in any capacity.
As much as usgov would love another reason to clutch pearls and shriek about China, we simply don't have the industry or resources to compete without a federal investment so massive that we wouldn't have any tax money left to give to the already ludicrously wealthy. And we can't have that.
But really american industry has been so thoroughly gutted that we can't compete anymore. Everyone else builds everything better and cheaper than we can. If there's a new space race to be had, we've already lost.
I actually think the US industry is perfectly capable of competing in the space race if given regulatory streamlining, long-term consistent goals, and relatively modest funding by congress.
But none of those are going to happen. I mean SpaceX was delayed to do an environmental impact statement to check whether their rockets would land on whales in the gulf of mexico. Nobody's serious.
Potentially destroying a significant amount of higher level mammals in the ocean is a real issue. Spacex managed to built their launch facility right on top of a formerly protected area
I think they'll be fine
Free countries do not have long-term consistent goals, almost by definition. They have elections instead, in which citizens indirectly determine the national goals and priorities for the next few years.
It feels like China hit an inflection point where they can rapidly progress, catch up, and perhaps surpass the US technologically. The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry.
I think this is still a negative for the US though. China’s competitiveness means the Dollar and the US economy aren’t going to be dominant for long, or at least they’ll need to share their position with China. And US influence on the world order has been destroyed in the last year. If all of this continues - China’s progress, the slow erosion of American dominance, etc - then I think America will have to confront serious problems, like how it will deal with debt.
> The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry.
Did it? We're talking 1949 up to a few years ago. 70 odd years from mass starvation to having their own space station. One could even say it's less than that, starting with the reforms in the 80s.
Yup, people forget how fast China has grown in less than 30 years. This viral photo is 26 years apart. Meanwhile, there’s trains older than that in the NYC metro fleet [1].
It's hard to see how China can sustain itself economically when the population is predicted to half by the end of the century and 30% the population will be >65 years old by 2050.
Isn't the US stock market betting on AGI and superintelligence in the next decade? Maybe a lower population won't be as big of an issue, or even an advantage.
If you haven't been following space updates closely, the US is _already_ in a race with China, especially in regards to the Artemis (moon) missions. That being said it's mostly being used as an excuse to keep SLS alive and prop up the legacy space contractors... It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior...
> It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior...
If you pick a random person off the street and ask them who discovered the Americas will they answer 1. Leif Erikson, 2. Indigenous peoples or 3. Christopher Columbus? If you ask people who invented the smartphone will they say Apple or some other company?
It’s absolutely possible to lose a race you had previously won.
Or indeed, ask them who won the space race, because by most measures, that was the Soviets too.
Soviets achieved:
- First artificial Orbit ( Sputnik )
- First animal to orbit ( Laika )
- First Man to orbit ( Yuri Gagarin )
- First Woman to orbit (Valentina Tereshkova )
- First EVA ( Alexei Leonov )
- First moon landing ( Luna 9 )
- First landing on another planet ( Venera 8 )
Many of these years before the USA achieved the equivalent. The first female US astronaut wasn't until the mid 1980's.
The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing.
Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
They are still jerking on these 50+ years old achievements, without having new ones. "Space race" didn't stop after Venera landing, and soviets/russians are thing of the past now. Aside of useless ISS trips, they have no relevance in space anymore.
> "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
"Won the space race" because they were first at the very beginning is a nonsense too. Following this logic, China won rocket race because they invented first rockets centuries ago.
What use is the stuff that went on 60 years in the past when most people involved with it are dead and a lot of the knowledge has been lost in the meantime?
I remember picking through an aerospace scrapyard in North Hollywood a decade ago with extremely-talented launch engineers (and entrepreneurs). The aim was to look at parts, measure them and figure out why they were built like they were. We looked, a little, at stuff like nozzles. But mostly we focussed on bolts, joiners, turbine blades and the like.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061943 danishSuri1994 said that if others like China and ESA did not also develop reusable rockets they would be priced out of orbit access entirely. I have a question about that, but their comment got killed faster than I could type and submit my question so I'll ask it a level up.
Why would not having reusable rockets price someone like China or ESA out of orbit access?
I can see how it could price them out of the business of selling orbit access to other parties, but I don't see how it would stop them from accessing orbit for their own purposes.
> European satellites can and do regularly launch on SpaceX though.
For now, that is. Until someone from Europe says something mean about the Bully in Chief, or threatens to side with the victim of an aggressive war… The EU can’t trust the USA anymore, so it’s high time to invest in sovereign orbit access.
If the cost of returning and refurbishing a rocket stage is less than the cost of building a new one then that gives a competitive advantage on price.
But space flight is a strategic competency for states so China, the EU, and even eventually Russia, will all develop reusable rockets. I suspect that launch capacity will far exceed demand and that none will make profits for a long time.
Because if you can't sell launches on the open market, your own launches become exponentially more expensive. Cost sharing allows for the economies of scale that let governments piggyback.
Multiple reusable rockets will drive prices down to a modest increment over the cost. Even rockets similar to Falcon 9 will have this effect, to the benefit of launch customers (and detriment of SpaceX, losing their effective monopoly.)
(Not sure why this lesson in economics got a downvote?)
That's awesome.
Secretly (?) I'm hoping for another "space race"— this time between the U.S. and China. I'm hoping this for the U.S.'s sake. I'm hoping that good can come of it.
All it would take to revolutionise things is for SpaceX to open source all their engineering designs, and let the Germans and the Chinese build the things.
Who pays for it? It would be pretty funny to try to borrow from China...
So even if its just a jobs program with a neat outcome, we'd have to deal with tax reform first, I'd imagine.
You know the Chinese government is more in debt than the United States, right? It's structured differently, but that doesn't change much. Or is worse, because you can end up with the government backing/cosigning for government joint ventures in the same industries all over the nation (for example EVs).
If true, then the question of "who pays for this race" is even stronger, no?
I can't help but wonder about why countries are doing this. Launch detection? Cameras? Other secret use? Making money for commercial sats? (Starlink, maybe GPS-equivalent, other?)
Satellite constellations (links in the final paragraph of the OP article).
I hope they become better at injecting payloads into low orbit. The higher orbits Chinese companies use for internet constellations right now have huge risks of space debris, since satellites will take hundreds of years to fall out of orbit.
It's true they're using much higher LEO orbits—not sure why you were downvoted for this basic and relevant fact. While Starlink goes to 500-600 km altitudes, Qianfan seems to target 800 km[a], and Guowang has been launching to 900 km and 1,145 km [b,c]. (I'm not discussing the few Starlinks in VLEO orbits below 300 km, because I don't know what the concrete plans are with those).
Those are orbits with 100+ year dynamic lifetimes (as is regularly discussed, i.e. ref [d]). It's true that they could actively deorbit them; that's the lifespan of passive debris that fails to actively deorbit. (Ref [d] also discusses spent rocket stages in this context, and China's uniquely bad behavior there).
I assume the main motive behind this is basic business economics. China doesn't have reusable boosters; the ones that might succeed this month won't reach Falcon 9 levels of mass production, and launch cadence, for several years. They're on an expensive on-ramp. To a first-order simplification 1,100 km orbits need only 1/4th as many satellites for the same coverage as 550 km orbits.
[a] https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-...
[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang
[c] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/china-may-have-taken-a...
[d] https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-coul...
If the per kg price goes low enough, you can do on-orbit manufacturing of some materials that are impossible to produce in a gravity field.
There is a race to the moon happening right now
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/spacex-us-moo...
You don't hear about it much, for some reason.
There is a market for this on Kalshi and China is narrowly in the lead again, according to traders.
https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoonman/manned-mission-to-the-m...
The practical part of space flight is launching satellites, and weapons. Both countries are already doing both.
If we're discussing manned missions to the moon or Mars, as an American I'd prefer China spent all the money and the US didn't bother. It'd be cool to see it happen, but no one can identify practical benefits, aside from a political win.
You are missing that the money and research into figuring out how to solve many engineering and scientific challenges related to the missions had tremendous benefit to industry later.
As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important
It's not clear that concentrating so much money on a single government project fosters more benefit than having the money go to a variety of other projects. It is easy to see the items developed by something like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program, but we often miss the innovations created by private industry when you compare a similar total spend (Bastiat's "seen and unseen"). One example of the alternative is how (private) demand for cellular telephony has triggered many innovations, from powerful and efficient microcontrollers to bright LCD screens, and fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.
If you want to do research to benefit industry, you can just do so. There's no particular reason research funding tied to human space flight should get better results.
I'm thinking that Apollo covered 90% of the useful spin-offs from developing tech for manned travel to the moon or Mars. And at least 90% of what's left was either covered by the ISS, or could be covered by a few small LEO space stations.
The economic cases for manned moon or Mars programs look really iffy these days. The US has poured tens of $billions down the SLS rat hole, with very little to show for it. And Wienersmith's A City on Mars is a pretty damning dissection of the whole concept of Martian colonies.
The SLS is widely understood to be less about research and development, and more about pork barreling, and jobs program. I don't buy that humanity should avoid investing in space travel because US Congress and surrounding governmental beaurcracy is not running projects effectively. That argument would stop just about any human activity.
It's pretty difficult to predict what spinoffs would come from attempting to put a colony on Mars. I would imagine to succeed we would need to solve a lot of challenges with human biology, genetic engineering, automation, and many novel engineering solutions.
But economics is not the only reason to do things, and I bet you don't expect everything humans do to have a purely economic rational.
That take is unbelievably shortsighted.
A Far Side lunar base is not some cool sci fi brag. It is a massive strategic advantage, and brushing it off misses everything that actually matters.
The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception. The Moon itself becomes a giant wall of rock that blocks sensors, lasers, and signals. It is the closest thing to perfect concealment anyone is ever going to get in space.
From that position, gravity is on your side. Sending kinetic weapons toward Earth takes almost no energy. Sending anything from Earth to the Moon takes a huge amount of fuel just to fight the gravity well. The attacker on the surface is always at a disadvantage, and the lunar side barely has to spend anything to strike.
A base on the Moon also survives whatever happens on Earth. Even a full scale nuclear exchange leaves it untouched. That means guaranteed retaliation. It becomes a true third strike platform, something no one can wipe out in a first strike. It locks in deterrence in a way that completely changes the strategic balance.
And if one country gets there first, mutual deterrence is over. They hold an untargetable, unreachable launch point that the rest of the planet cannot neutralize. That is not a symbolic win. It is unilateral control over the highest ground humanity has access to.
I honestly do not know why some people do not see it. This is literally rewriting Earth geopolitics. For hundreds of years we worked within Mackinder’s logic: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; who rules the World Island commands the World.
With a lunar base it becomes: Who rules the Moon commands cislunar space; who commands cislunar space commands Earth orbit; who commands Earth orbit commands the Earth.
This is not about pride or prestige. It is about who controls the one location in the solar system that offers absolute strategic dominance. Whoever controls the Moon controls the high ground.
Good luck competing with China if they get there first.
EDIT: Apparently posting six comments in thirty minutes counts as "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. " and whoever decided that is a proper knob. I got throttled again, so if you reply, I can't respond anymore for now.
Disagree on the technical aspects. It'd be inexpensive to monitor adversary military activities on the lunar far side: one lunar satellite would do it. The gravity well is not trivial, and any launches from the surface (should this become a thing) would be immediately visible from high orbit, by the intense infrared glow of rocket combustion exhaust. (Exact same way nuclear early warning systems work on Earth, for that matter[0]).
Agree that the general concept is a serious one, but I don't think the numbers work out on your specific implementation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Support_Program#Histor...
> The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception.
What prevents someone from sending a Lunar-orbiting imaging satellite to image everything on the Far Side? The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has already been imaging the Far Side for over a decade.
I agree with your general points about it being a difficult location to get to, but if it's possible to put regular satellites in Lunar orbit, surely its possible to park some warheads too just in case...
If a big power gets there first, they’re not going to treat lunar orbit like some kind of shared international space. They’d treat it as their turf. At that point you can’t just assume you can drop an imaging satellite into whatever orbit you want they’d have both the motive and the capability to deny access.
This doesn’t make any sense. You must be trolling or a bot.
What good does inter-planetary bombardment do me? I already have enough nukes to destroy the world. I mean it’s a bit redundant
You open by calling me a bot, which is an odd way to start a serious argument.
It isn’t about extra ways to blow things up. It’s about survivability and leverage. A platform you can’t detect or preempt changes deterrence dynamics, just like subs do. The advantage comes from being untargetable, not from adding more warheads.
But missiles from the moon would take way longer to arrive than ICBMs, so more time to intercept them.
A concealed base with perfect third strike capability that costs a zillion dollars per bullet to load with ammo is actually not that useful.
That Far Side base is irrelevant unless is can be supplied, at scale. Talk to a few folks who served in Afghanistan about the costs and miseries of long logistical pipelines to great-in-theory locations.
Then, the base has to easily project serious military power to places that matter to us. Lunar escape velocity is ~2.4km/s, which is not trivial. After that, transit time to Earth is multiple days. Vs. current ICBM's can put nuclear warheads anywhere, in under an hour, without actually achieving LEO.
BTW - if nation C can haul enough stuff to the Far Side to build a substantial base, then obviously it's neither untargetable nor unreachable for nation U.
don't nuclear submarines achieve similar strategic benefits?
> Good luck competing with China if they get there first.
The French, the English, the Dutch and the Portuguese all got to Asia.
Which one was first and which one(s) were last to leave is not the same.
The far side of the moon doesn't have a magic "dibs, it's mine" quality. It's big, and it's an extreme environment.
By "there first" I don't mean - whoever sets the foot there. I assumed that was obvious.
"If a thing which is remote and in the future takes the characteristic of being done first by my adversary then the mostly likely outcome is a marvel universe dystopia endgame where everything we do is fruitless and they win and we lose"
Look, I get you don't think you wrote hyperbole, but you did. Getting to a strategic capability based on far side occupancy and assuming that automatically is non competitive and incurs first to file wins outcome.. please. The most likely outcome is an antarctica treaty. The next most likely outcome is broadly speaking comparable capabilities and MAD.
By all means wargame your own vision where China does it solo and nobody else can compete.
I'm not talking about planting a flag and saying "dibs." I'm talking about the first country that reaches actual sustained capability, moving mass, building infrastructure, supplying it, and controlling the surrounding space. Whoever gets there first shapes the rules, because that's how every strategic domain has worked so far!
That's why "just let China have the Moon" doesn't really hold up. These places are only neutral when no one has the power to enforce anything. Once a country can build, maintain, and defend a Far Side installation, the incentives shift. If multiple nations reach that level around the same time, fine, you get something like MAD. But if one gets there years ahead of everyone else, it's not going to look like Antarctica, it's going to look like someone taking the high ground before anyone else can contest it.
Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space :) In 2025, 12 countries (so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#By_country
Seems like every month there is ~30 launches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...), November has mostly US and China, but also have (or will have) India, Turkey, Japan, Russia and Italy as countries with launches. Pretty great to see that more nations are getting involved.
Randomly, I stumbled upon the Shijian series of satellites, apparently featuring an arm that could tow other satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian
> Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space
But only two investing in high-cadence, high-mass capabilities.
Would the US even fight?
We've lost the shipbuilding race, auto race, drone race, without anyone in DC actually noticing. Most Americans don't even realize China has a manned space station. If China had a presence on the moon, would that wake up congress, or would they just put out a few tweets and go back to cultural dramatics?
Congress will notice when old politburo members start living on the moon base healthy for another 20 years
Will they live longer on the moon?
(Maybe you are just joking, but I wonder about the idea.)
When I was a kid, it was a general assumption in science fiction that living in zero-G or low-G would provide health/longevity benefits. Our experience with the ISS shows that microgravity is bad for health (muscle atrophy, bone loss, vision problems). It is not clear that low gravity would be much different.
Honestly I doubt it. Current government doesn't really have the ability to get their shit together and compete with anyone in any capacity.
As much as usgov would love another reason to clutch pearls and shriek about China, we simply don't have the industry or resources to compete without a federal investment so massive that we wouldn't have any tax money left to give to the already ludicrously wealthy. And we can't have that.
But really american industry has been so thoroughly gutted that we can't compete anymore. Everyone else builds everything better and cheaper than we can. If there's a new space race to be had, we've already lost.
I actually think the US industry is perfectly capable of competing in the space race if given regulatory streamlining, long-term consistent goals, and relatively modest funding by congress.
But none of those are going to happen. I mean SpaceX was delayed to do an environmental impact statement to check whether their rockets would land on whales in the gulf of mexico. Nobody's serious.
Potentially destroying a significant amount of higher level mammals in the ocean is a real issue. Spacex managed to built their launch facility right on top of a formerly protected area I think they'll be fine
Free countries do not have long-term consistent goals, almost by definition. They have elections instead, in which citizens indirectly determine the national goals and priorities for the next few years.
It feels like China hit an inflection point where they can rapidly progress, catch up, and perhaps surpass the US technologically. The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry.
I think this is still a negative for the US though. China’s competitiveness means the Dollar and the US economy aren’t going to be dominant for long, or at least they’ll need to share their position with China. And US influence on the world order has been destroyed in the last year. If all of this continues - China’s progress, the slow erosion of American dominance, etc - then I think America will have to confront serious problems, like how it will deal with debt.
> The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry.
Did it? We're talking 1949 up to a few years ago. 70 odd years from mass starvation to having their own space station. One could even say it's less than that, starting with the reforms in the 80s.
Yup, people forget how fast China has grown in less than 30 years. This viral photo is 26 years apart. Meanwhile, there’s trains older than that in the NYC metro fleet [1].
[1] https://petapixel.com/2025/09/26/incredible-photos-show-the-...
It's hard to see how China can sustain itself economically when the population is predicted to half by the end of the century and 30% the population will be >65 years old by 2050.
Hard choices lie ahead.
Every developed nation is looking at that cliff though.
Isn't the US stock market betting on AGI and superintelligence in the next decade? Maybe a lower population won't be as big of an issue, or even an advantage.
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If you haven't been following space updates closely, the US is _already_ in a race with China, especially in regards to the Artemis (moon) missions. That being said it's mostly being used as an excuse to keep SLS alive and prop up the legacy space contractors... It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior...
> It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior...
If you pick a random person off the street and ask them who discovered the Americas will they answer 1. Leif Erikson, 2. Indigenous peoples or 3. Christopher Columbus? If you ask people who invented the smartphone will they say Apple or some other company?
It’s absolutely possible to lose a race you had previously won.
Or indeed, ask them who won the space race, because by most measures, that was the Soviets too.
Soviets achieved:
Many of these years before the USA achieved the equivalent. The first female US astronaut wasn't until the mid 1980's.The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing.
Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
They are still jerking on these 50+ years old achievements, without having new ones. "Space race" didn't stop after Venera landing, and soviets/russians are thing of the past now. Aside of useless ISS trips, they have no relevance in space anymore.
> "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
"Won the space race" because they were first at the very beginning is a nonsense too. Following this logic, China won rocket race because they invented first rockets centuries ago.
What use is the stuff that went on 60 years in the past when most people involved with it are dead and a lot of the knowledge has been lost in the meantime?
I don't necessarily think the knowledge is lost, but the second system effect sure is in full swing.
It isn’t lost. But it’s decaying.
I remember picking through an aerospace scrapyard in North Hollywood a decade ago with extremely-talented launch engineers (and entrepreneurs). The aim was to look at parts, measure them and figure out why they were built like they were. We looked, a little, at stuff like nozzles. But mostly we focussed on bolts, joiners, turbine blades and the like.
That sounds like living amongst the ruins of the Roman Empire
> sounds like living amongst the ruins of the Roman Empire
Down to the fact that the Eastern Roman Empire was going strong.
Even in 2014, when I was in North Hollywood, SpaceX was carrying the torch.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061943 danishSuri1994 said that if others like China and ESA did not also develop reusable rockets they would be priced out of orbit access entirely. I have a question about that, but their comment got killed faster than I could type and submit my question so I'll ask it a level up.
Why would not having reusable rockets price someone like China or ESA out of orbit access?
I can see how it could price them out of the business of selling orbit access to other parties, but I don't see how it would stop them from accessing orbit for their own purposes.
It can price you out of some projects - stuff like Starlink is basically impossible without the cost reduction via reusability.
The Wolf Amendment prevents Chinese satellites from launching on American rockets, so they don't have access to SpaceX prices. (which start at $325K)
European satellites can and do regularly launch on SpaceX though.
> European satellites can and do regularly launch on SpaceX though.
For now, that is. Until someone from Europe says something mean about the Bully in Chief, or threatens to side with the victim of an aggressive war… The EU can’t trust the USA anymore, so it’s high time to invest in sovereign orbit access.
If the cost of returning and refurbishing a rocket stage is less than the cost of building a new one then that gives a competitive advantage on price.
But space flight is a strategic competency for states so China, the EU, and even eventually Russia, will all develop reusable rockets. I suspect that launch capacity will far exceed demand and that none will make profits for a long time.
If only EU would take affordable mass space launch like the critical strategic capability it is :P
Because if you can't sell launches on the open market, your own launches become exponentially more expensive. Cost sharing allows for the economies of scale that let governments piggyback.
Internal spending vs imports, I suppose. Keynes and all that
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Multiple reusable rockets will drive prices down to a modest increment over the cost. Even rockets similar to Falcon 9 will have this effect, to the benefit of launch customers (and detriment of SpaceX, losing their effective monopoly.)
(Not sure why this lesson in economics got a downvote?)
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> space stops being rare air — and becomes infrastructure
This reeks of AI slop. Plenty of “it’s not just X, its Y” in there too.