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“I’ve been pretty adamant in my comments that we’re in a space race with the Chinese and that they’re very good,” he said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “Especially in the last 10 years, they’ve had a lot of success. They usually say what they mean and do what they say.

But despite China’s many achievements in space — which include an occupied space station in low Earth orbit and the landing of a rover on Mars in 2021 — the United States remains on track to return astronauts to the lunar surface before its arch-rival, Nelson said.

NASA plans to one day establish a permanent presence at the hottest real estate in the Solar System: the Moon’s south pole. In a key step toward that goal, NASA intends to fly four astronauts around the moon late next year and then land humans on the surface in late 2026 for the first time since the last of the Apollo missions in 1972.

“I think we’re right on schedule,” Nelson said.

However, that schedule has been pushed back several times due to technical challenges, including trying to better understand how the capsule’s heat shield works to fly astronauts to and from the lunar vicinity. During a test flight around the moon in 2022 with no one aboard, the heat shield of NASA’s Orion spacecraft “worn differently than expected” in more than 100 places as it plunged through the atmosphere, according to a report published in spring by NASA’s Inspector General. In some places, it looked like pieces had been torn off, leaving hole-like marks in the material.

“If the same problem occurs on future Artemis missions, it could result in the loss of the vehicle or crew,” the report concluded.

NASA’s plan to return humans to the surface is complex, requiring Orion to orbit the moon and then a separate spacecraft — SpaceX’s Starship — to transport them to the lunar surface. Starship would then fly the astronauts back to rendezvous with Orion in lunar orbit for the return trip back to Earth.

Given Starship’s important role in landing on the surface, NASA is closely monitoring its development. SpaceX recently conducted the fourth test flight of the massive vehicle, the largest and most powerful ever built, taking it around most of the globe in what the company said was a largely successful flight that will allowed to continue developing it rapidly.

Nelson said a “good indicator of” NASA’s ability to get to the moon before China “is SpaceX’s success in their latest Starship flight.” But Elon Musk’s company still needs to demonstrate that the vehicle can be refueled in Earth orbit by a fleet of space tankers, fly humans safely, as well as soft-land on the moon – all very ambitious, complex tasks that can take years to complete.

Both the US and China eventually seek to establish camps near the moon’s south pole, where there is water in the form of ice in its permanently shadowed craters. Not only is water vital to sustaining life, but its constituents, oxygen and hydrogen, can also be used as rocket fuel, enabling further exploration of the solar system.

Despite the competition between the U.S. and China, the two countries will have to find a way to coexist on and around the moon, Nelson said. The two countries’ space programs are also linked, he said, by threats in space.

U.S. officials have said Russia is developing a nuclear weapon that could be used in orbit to destroy satellites and cripple key U.S. national security infrastructure used for missile warnings, intelligence and to guide precision munitions, among other things. things. Russia has denied that it intends to deploy a nuclear weapon in space.

Still, it should concern all nations with assets in space, Nelson said, and especially China, which operates not only a growing number of spacecraft that can be disabled by a nuclear blast, but also a manned space station.

Speaking publicly about the threat for the first time, he said: “All nations should be concerned that Russia may intend to put a nuclear weapon into orbit. Such a capability could pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the world, as well as to the vital communications, scientific, meteorological, agricultural, commercial and national security services on which we all depend.

He added that “this is an opening for the Chinese government, whose Chinese astronauts and space station would be threatened by the deployment of a Russian nuclear bomb in space. … They have an interest in Russia not having nuclear weapons. This is how they would use their position with Russia and the relationship between them [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to urge the Russians to rethink this?”

Placing a nuclear weapon in orbit would be a violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. And as China and Russia continue to compete with the U.S. in space, NASA and the State Department are seeking to lead a growing international coalition under what is known as The Artemis Accords, perhaps the most significant international space policy effort since the 1967 treaty.

In an effort to pressure China’s space program, which Nelson and others have criticized as operating in secret and as an arm of the military, signatories to the accords agree to abide by accepted norms of behavior in space and on and around the moon. Countries will be required to share scientific discoveries, for example, and to detail where they are working on the lunar surface and what they are doing.

Meanwhile, NASA’s lunar campaign continues. This year, the space agency hopes one of its commercial partners, Intuitive Machines, a Houston company, will land its second unmanned spacecraft on the moon, with other privately developed landers to follow in the coming years. Earlier this year, his spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle to land on the moon and the first American spacecraft to touch down softly since the Apollo era.

But for all the talk of a space race with China, astronauts who are part of the Artemis mission planned to fly around the moon in 2025 said they don’t quite see it that way.

The flight commander, NASA astronaut Reed Wiseman, said during a recent Washington Post live event that, “We don’t think it’s a race. We feel that this is the right direction to explore and this is the direction we are headed.”

He added: “But as an American, I feel there is increasing pressure.”