NASA’s leader is worried about an international race for lunar real estate, as China prepares for a series of missions to the Moon.
China this week is planning to launch a robotic spacecraft — Chang’e-6 — to the side of the moon facing away from Earth. It will be the first of three missions set to take place over the next four years that could set the stage for a Chinese base on the moon’s south pole, where there is suspected to be water.
With the space race once again heating up, NASA administrator Bill Nelson told Yahoo Finance that China could leave the U.S. in the dust when it comes to putting boots on the Moon.
“I think it’s not beyond the pale that China would suddenly say, ‘We are here. You stay out,’” Nelson said. “That would be very unfortunate — to take what has gone on on planet Earth for years, grabbing territory, and saying it’s mine and people fighting over it.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. had to push back the timeline of its Artemis program — which is expected to put people back into lunar orbit for the first time in 50 years — to test and troubleshoot a handful of technical difficulties that took place during its first mission. NASA now expects to land its astronauts near the Moon’s southern pole by September 2026 under its Artemis III mission.
This isn’t the first time Nelson has warned about China’s potential guarding of lunar resources. He previously told reporters that he fears China will lay claim to water sources on the moon, “as they have done with the Spratly Islands” — an archipelago in the South China Sea that has long been a source of disputes between several surrounding countries.
“When you combine [China’s] history of their politics on Planet Earth, we just need to be careful that a celestial body such as the moon, such as Mars, is open for all, and it doesn’t become a territorial grabbing,” Nelson told Yahoo Finance. “That’s what we want to avoid.”
China has its sights set on crewed lunar landing by 2030, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced last year.
Nelson said last year that the U.S. would “preserve those potential reserves for the international community,” as the water could be used for rocket fuel. In 2020, NASA and the Department of State introduced the Artemis Accords, to ensure cooperation among nations and the use of information and resources in plans to put people into the moon’s orbit and, ultimately, on the Moon. The program has 39 signatories, but China is not one of them.
The project is partnering with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to help develop human landing systems.