The senator wanted to promise. A staid oath. For the last six years – or maybe the last decade or quarter of a century, depending on how you count it – the United States and China have been locked in a space race, a competition to see which nation can send its men to the moon. Senator Ted Cruz wanted Jared Isaacman, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead NASA, to promise that the United States would not lose.
Cruz pulled off a bit of a surprise at Isaacman’s confirmation hearing last April. It was a moon poster. On one side stood three astronauts and a giant Chinese flag. On the other side were two more figures in spacesuits, with the tiniest stars and stripes grafted onto the lunar soil. Cruz apologized for the imbalance. “My team used ChatGPT,” explained the senator who chairs NASA’s oversight committee.
Cruz then, with a little more seriousness, asked Isaacman, “Do we have your pledge that you will not allow the scenario depicted on the right side of this poster to happen? That China will not shoot us to the moon?”
Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who paid for his own space missions, replied: “Senator, I can only see the left side of this poster.”
It was a devastatingly fucking perfect answer. And Isaacman may have meant it. But before he testified, the Trump administration began a lawsuit that ruined NASA, forcing the departure of nearly 4,000 agency employees. The White House then proposed a massive 24 percent cut to NASA’s budget. Trump then stripped Isaacman of the nomination and installed a fresh part-time acting boss who boasted in his official NASA biography that he was one half of “America’s first and longest-married television couple.” Then this guy got into a fight with Elon Musk, who is building NASA’s lunar lander. And Isaacman started running again. In December, Trump ended the year with an executive order calling for Americans to return to the moon by 2028.
If this all sounds suboptimal to you, welcome to the club, space ranger. This dysfunction is one of many reasons why the huge majority of the two dozen sources I interviewed for this story believe China will put humans 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 sanguine about America’s chances. “We made the worst of all worlds,” one of the nine tells me. “We set it up as a race, not planning to win.”
The original space program was the ultimate symbol of America at its screaming eagle peak. Rocket scientist was compact for “brilliant” and many of them worked in Huntsville, Alabama, also known as Rocket City. Word astronaut was synonymous with gravel, and the boldest of them could be found in Houston. Moon shot was (and is) a code for something borderline impossible. The space race has helped develop everything from the integrated circuit 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 cars, powers their homes with Chinese solar panels, and stays connected using phones made in China. Chinese scientists have outshined their American counterparts in producing high-quality research, and the White House has responded by cutting funding for American science and charging $100,000 to admit highly skilled immigrants. So if Chinese astronauts leave the lander and broadcast the results live in 4K resolution – and to be clear, it’s still an “if” at this point – it will be more than a source of national pride for Beijing. It will be a declaration that the American century is officially over.