Trump announced a space race with China. The United States loses

The senator wanted a promise. Solemn vow. For the past six years — or perhaps the last decade or quarter century, depending on how you count it — the United States and China have been locked in a space race, a race to see which country can put its people on the line. moon. Senator Ted Cruz wanted President Donald Trump’s nominee to run 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 stood three astronauts and a giant Chinese flag. On the other side were two other people wearing space suits, with the smallest stars and stripes implanted in them Lunar soil. Cruz apologized for the glitch. “My team used ChatGPT,” explained the senator, who chairs the committee that oversees NASA.

Cruz then, more seriously, asked Isaacman: “Do we have your commitment that you will not allow the scenario to the right of this poster to happen? That China will not beat us to the moon?”

“Senator, I only see the left side of this poster,” replied Isaacman, the billionaire businessman who paid for his space missions.

It was a perfect response to red meat. Perhaps Isaacman meant that. But by the time of his testimony, the Trump administration had begun a process that would do just that NASA wasteThis prompted the resignation of nearly 4,000 agency employees. Then the White House proposed a massive 24 percent cut in NASA’s budget. Trump then snatched up Isaacman’s nomination and appointed a new part-time acting president, a colleague who bragged in his official NASA biography that he was one half of “America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple.” Then this man picked a fight with Elon Muskwhich is building NASA’s lunar lander. Isaacman is back in the race. In December, Trump concluded the year by issuing an executive order pushing Americans to return to the moon by 2028.

If all of this sounds sub-optimal to you, welcome to the club, space ranger. This flaw is one of many reasons why the vast majority of the 20 sources interviewed for this story believe China will put humans on the moon first. I spoke with nine former NASA officials who served at the space agency’s highest levels under Presidents Trump and Biden; None of them were optimistic about America’s chances. One of the nine told me: “We did the worst of all.” “We made it a race without planning to win.”

The original space program was the ultimate symbol of America at the top of the screaming eagle. Rocket scientist It was short for “cool,” and many of them worked in Huntsville, Alabama, also known as the Rocket City. The word astronaut He was synonymous with grit, and you could find the boldest of them in Houston. Moonshot It was (and still is) a symbol of 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, he drives much of the world Chinese electric carssupplies their homes with Chinese solar panelsand stays connected to phones made in China. Chinese scientists have outperformed their American counterparts in producing high-quality research, and the White House responded by eliminating American scientific funding and imposing a $100,000 fine to admit highly skilled immigrants. So, if Chinese astronauts step down from their lander and stream the results live in 4K — and to be clear, it’s still an “if” at this point — it would be more than just a point of national pride for Beijing. It would be a declaration that the American century had officially ended.