The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon . . . It’s really hard.
Pethokoukis: As someone — and I’m speaking about myself — who wants to get America back to the moon as soon as possible, get cooking on getting humans to Mars for the first time, what should I make of what’s happening at NASA right now?
It all seems a little chaotic. I’m a little worried. Should I be?
Davenport: Yes, I think you should be. And I think a lot of the American public isn’t paying attention and they’re going to see the Artemis II mission, which you mentioned, and that’s that mission to send a crew of astronauts around the moon. It won’t land on the moon, but it’ll go around, and I think if that goes well, NASA’s going to take a victory leap. But as you correctly point out, that is a far cry from getting astronauts back on the lunar surface.
The lander isn’t ready. SpaceX, as acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy just said, is far behind, reversing himself from like a month earlier when he said no, they appear to be on track, but everybody knew that they were well behind because they’ve had 11 test flights, and they still haven’t made it to orbit with their Starship rocket.
The rocket itself that’s going to launch them into the vicinity of the moon, the SLS, launches about once every two years. It’s incredibly expensive, it’s not reusable, and there are problems within the agency itself. There are deep cuts to it. A lot of expertise is taking early retirements. It doesn’t have a full-time leader. It hasn’t had a full-time leader since Trump won the election. At the same time, they’re sort of beating the drum saying we’re going to beat the Chinese back to the lunar surface, but I think a lot of people are increasingly looking at that with some serious concern and doubt.
For what it’s worth, when I looked at the betting markets, it gave the Chinese a two-to-one edge. It said that it was about a 65 percent chance they were going to get there first. Does that sound about right to you?
I’m not much of a betting man, but I do think there’s a very good chance. The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon, they haven’t done this. It’s really hard. They’re much more secretive, if they have setbacks and delays, we don’t necessarily know about them. But they’ve shown over the last 10, 20 years how capable they are. They have a space station in low earth orbit. They’ve operated a rover on Mars. They’ve gone to the far side of the moon twice, which nobody has done, and brought back a sample return. They’ve shown the ability to keep people alive in space for extended periods of times on the space station.
The moon seems within their capabilities and they’re saying they’re going to do it by 2030, and they don’t have the nettlesome problem of democracy where you’ve got one party come in and changing the budget, changing the direction for NASA, changing leadership. They’ve just set the moon — and, by the way, the south pole of the moon, which is where we want to go as well — as the destination and have been beating a path toward that for several years now.
Losing the Space Race (5:49)
. . . the American flags that the Apollo astronauts planted, they’re basically no longer there anymore. . . There are, however, two Chinese flags on the moon
Have you thought about what it will look like the day after, in this country, if China gets to the moon first and we have not returned there yet?
Actually, that’s a scenario I kind of paint out. I’ve got this new book called Rocket Dreams and we talk about the geopolitical tensions in there. Not to give too much of a spoiler, but NASA has said that the first person to return to the moon, for the US, is going to be a woman. And there’s a lot of people thinking, who could that be? It could be Jessica Meir, who is a mother and posted a picture of herself pregnant and saying, “This is what an astronaut looks like.” But it could very well be someone like Wang Yaping, who’s also a mother, and she came back from one of her stays on the International Space Station and had a message for her daughter that said, “I come back bringing all the stars for you.” So I think that I could see China doing it and sending a woman, and that moment where that would be a huge coup for them, and that would obviously be symbolic.
But when you’re talking about space as a tool of soft power and diplomacy, I think it would attract a lot of other nations to their side who are sort of waiting on the sidelines or who frankly aren’t on the sidelines, who have signed on to go to the United States, but are going to say, “Well, they’re there and you’re not, so that’s who we’re going to go with.”
I think about the wonderful alt-history show For All Mankind, which begins with the Soviets beating the US to the moon, and instead of Neil Armstrong giving the “one small step for man,” basically the Russian cosmonaut gives, “Its one small step for Marxism-Leninism,” and it was a bummer. And I really imagine that day, if China beats us, it is going to be not just, “Oh, I guess now we have to share the moon with someone else,” but it’s going to cause some national soul searching.
And there are clues to this, and actually I detail these two anecdotes in the book, that all of the flags, the American flags that the Apollo astronauts planted, they’re basically no longer there anymore. We know from Buzz Aldrin‘s memoir that the flag that he and Neil Armstrong planted in the lunar soil in 1969, Buzz said that he saw it get knocked over by the thrust in the exhaust of the module lifting off from the lunar surface. Even if that hadn’t happened, just the radiation environment would’ve bleached the flag white, as scientists believe it has to all the other flags that are on there. So there are essentially really no trace of the Apollo flags.
There are, however, two Chinese flags on the moon, and the first one, which was planted a couple of years ago, or unveiled a couple of years ago, was made not of cloth, but their scientists and engineers spent a year building a composite material flag designed specifically to withstand the harsh environment of the moon. When they went back last summer for their farside sample return mission, they built a flag, — and this is pretty amazing — out of basalt, like volcanic rock, which you find on Earth. And they use basalt from earth, but of course basalt is common on the moon. They were able to take the rock, turn it into lava, extract threads from the lava and weave this flag, which is now near the south pole of the moon. The significance of that is they are showing that they can use the resources of the moon, the basalt, to build flags. It’s called ISR: in situ resource utilization. So to me, nothing symbolizes their intentions more than that. (...)
SpaceX and the Falcon 9, the reusable rocket, has dropped launches down. It used to be if you got 10, 12 orbital rocket launches in a year, that was a good year. SpaceX is launching about every 48 hours now. It’s unprecedented what they’ve done. You’re seeing a lot of new players — Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, others — driving down the cost of launch.
That said, the main anchor tenant customer, the force driving all of this is still the government, it’s still NASA, it’s still the Pentagon. There is not a self-sustaining space economy that exists in addition or above and beyond the government. You’re starting to see bits of that, but really it’s the government that’s driving it.
Image: uncredited
[ed. Weaving lava on the moon?! Launches every 48 hrs?!]
