Space Policy Edition: Is there really a space race between the US and China?

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the host and also Chief of Space Policy here at The Planetary Society. This month, I am very excited to host somebody I've wanted to have on the show for a long time. Dr. Patrick Besha was a strategic advisor at NASA for many years. He is also the founder of the Global Space Group. He's an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, just an overall general expert in space policy. But his particular expertise is quite relevant these days. He was previously the overall lead for Asia, particularly China and India, in the Office of International and Interagency Relations at NASA. And he has a lot of longtime understanding and depth of research in China, in China space program. And of course, Mandarin, he speaks Mandarin, and the language. Done quite an extensive amount of work in that area. He was recently testifying before the House of Representatives, in the fall of 2025, on the role of China's space ambitions and the relative decisions that the United States should make, or not, in relation to those. 

It's probably understating it a bit to say that China's pretty important to overall US space policy these days. We have seen in the last few years an increasing amount of rhetoric about China as a geopolitical rival that must be met and matched in space capability in the United States. And it has basically set the current schedule for Artemis in terms of trying to land American allies and astronauts onto the surface of the moon before China, which is widely expected to occur sometime around 2030. Possibly earlier, possibly later. I have a lot of broad issues with the geopolitical framing, to be honest. I understand that there is a geopolitical dynamic and great power competition, but I look back to Apollo and I tend to worry that framing this too much of a race is great for the lead up, it helps you get there faster, it helps unlock resources, it helps establish political priority, but the problem with the race mentality, which we saw in Apollo, and which I should note, Artemis was expressly designed to avoid, was the end point. 

Now, once you have won, it's very hard to sustain that level of investment overall. It's also profoundly unfair in some ways to NASA, which despite the race rhetoric, has not been funded in any way to reflect a geopolitical priority in the United States. The funding for even just Artemis or the elements of Artemis have been at best slow and steady over the past 10 years, as opposed to the rapid spike of funding for Apollo. We are relying primarily on commercial entities to make up the difference from what the government is willing to invest in what has now become, apparently, a priority for US national interest. These may work, but it is a very different way of approaching it. So I want to dive into this role. Is China even in a race with the United States, from their perspective? What are their capabilities? What are the consequences if China gets to the moon first? And of course, we'll expand this out to what NASA does in space science and what China does in space science, and if that's even consistent with the race mentality. 

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Planetary Society is at planetary.org/join if you want to join us as a member, or just the website. Of course, on all the social media channels. Again, if you like this show, consider joining. And if you are a member, thank you very much. You enable us to do this job. And consider upgrading your membership and helping us do an even better job. We are, if I may say, working real hard these days to make sure that space science remains one of the priority capabilities that we do, not just in the United States, but around the world. And now, Dr. Patrick Besha. 

Patrick Besha, thank you for joining the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.

Patrick Besha: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Casey Dreier: Is China in a great power competition with the United States? And if they are, are they actually competing and racing us to the moon? Or is it just us thinking that they're doing that?

Patrick Besha: Well, I think we are in a strategic competition, the US and China. I think a lot of the rhetoric about a space race has really been coming from the United States. You don't hear quite as much at, say, a leadership level regarding a space race in China, but they are closely watching what we do in space. They're watching the advances that NASA is making in the Artemis program and carefully paying attention to every step along the way. So there is a competition and they're well aware that there's a competition, but the rhetoric is less heated than it is in the United States.

Casey Dreier: Why do you think that is? Why is that rhetoric lower? Almost from an outsider perspective that I have, you could almost argue that they're just doing their program and it's the United States who's being quite reactionary to it. But I know that it's not as open of a society, so you don't see those levels of debates. Are they executing a plan pretty much as designed years ago, or have they changed in reaction to what the United States has done at any point in terms of space? At least again, in civil space.

Patrick Besha: Yeah, so two things. So they are executing a plan that was largely formulated a decade ago in some cases. Certainly with the lunar program, some of the major elements of it were formulated two decades ago. In terms of human spaceflight, this started in about 1992, and so it's even longer time ago that they first envisioned having a space station, and things like that. So in a lot of ways, it is a methodical movement forward and a longstanding plan. I think another way to look at it, however, is that China historically has not publicized a lot of their missions far in advance and kept it fairly quiet. This includes even major launches of the human spaceflight program. And in part, this is perhaps because they didn't want to lose face or they didn't want it to become a sensitive issue or a political issue. And so I think there's an aspect of that at play here as well. 

However, I do think they're becoming very confident in their mission to land the Chinese astronauts on the surface of the moon. We're hearing continuing progress updates and more discussion about this upcoming mission, and series of missions actually.

Casey Dreier: Is this actually a stated public goal or is this all inferred in terms of the human landings? Because it's obviously progressing in that direction, but I've been hard-pressed to actually see it. And again, I just may have missed it, and this is one of the challenges of following this. Is this a public goal that they will land astronauts by a certain date?

Patrick Besha: It is.

Casey Dreier: Okay.

Patrick Besha: It's a stated goal and it's been stated by the China Manned Space Agency, among others.

Casey Dreier: So let's go back to the origins. So the Chinese political system is, would you call it relatively unique in the current global order, in terms of its communist, but also has strong capitalist undertones? You did a lot of research in this and talked about there's these diffused... Or there are people, what is it called, diffused authoritarianism or fragmented authoritarianism. Summarize just like what system is producing this and what processes need to happen to coalesce around this idea of getting Chinese astronauts onto the surface of the moon. And how does that compare to our process in the United States in terms of what is guiding that and what enables that to survive over time?

Patrick Besha: Yeah. So I do think China has a unique system and a lot of that's just by historical circumstance. You mentioned a term of our fragmented authoritarianism, and this is an idea that some China scholars, Kenneth Lieberthal and Michael Oxenberg, developed back in the 1980s, studying energy policy in China. The idea here was that you had several bases of sources of authority in the Chinese system. There was the party, the Communist Party of China, there was the military, and then there was what we might call the state, the state government. And it was the interplay between these various high level sources of authority that yielded decisions and policymaking. And then within those, you also had various lines of authority. So you had, within the state, you had ministries. Within the party, you might have party officials in charge of provinces, and then you had things like state-owned enterprises. And these three centers also buy for power and the ability to make the decisions. 

And so this system largely exists today. It was an observation that they formulated decades ago, but by and large, it's a very useful way to explain the political system in China. And so this is how space policy is made in China. This is fairly different from the US. I would argue it's completely different actually. So in the US, as we all know, especially with this podcast, there are basically several sources of policymaking. There's the White House, there's the Congress, there's industry, which is playing a much more significant role now, and there's, let's call the scientific community. And policies are, if you have a new mission you want to do or a new strategy, it could come from the White House, which may propose it, may propose the budget to Congress. Congress may either agree with it or not agree with it, appropriate funding through an appropriations bill, or provide new direction through an authorization bill. 

Industry may chart their own path in certain areas, which we're seeing more of in the last decade. And then you have the scientific community, where you have things like the National Academies of Science developing decadal surveys for space science, for earth science. And they all weigh in and they all have to say and they all have a preference for what they want to do in space. So there's negotiations in both, right? In both systems, just the actors are quite different.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. But I see, I think reading some of your background material, that there seems to be equivalence in some of that, that there is like a Chinese scientific academy, right? The Chinese Academy of Sciences. And you've identified that as a pretty important mover. I think there is this discussion of policy entrepreneurs, I think was the term. And so these ideas are also starting somewhere, but they're just working through a very different set of checkpoints and interests being represented. What type of strategy tends to be deployed? For example, putting sending humans to the moon aside for a second, how does the Chinese system determine what's the next based science mission that they're going to do? Through what process does that occur? Because there must be some scientific input on that.

Patrick Besha: Yeah. So there's a couple examples that might be pretty useful. So first of all, I do want to clarify some pretty key distinctions between, say the National Academies of Science in the US and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China. In the US, it serves more of an advisory function where they convene the scientific community, they develop the key science questions, they ask the community to prioritize those questions, and then they produce the Decadal survey. That process is not really the same in China. We have seen, say in the last 10 or 15 years, I think probably two major efforts where the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a space science strategy, a long-term space science strategy that they then published. Doesn't necessarily carry the same weight as a decadal survey in their system. But that's not really the only role for the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They actually also have very significant role in funding startups, commercial space companies. They have a much, much greater role in some of the business of space, certainly than the national academies. 

And then they serve a function in some of the different groups that guide overall China space policy. But in terms of how missions are proposed and things like that, there's a couple of examples. And I think space in China's interesting in that respect because there's often a few scientists that propose a mission or an initiative, and they carry the day. So one of the most famous examples was back in the 1980s where, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan had started talking about the strategic defense initiative. We call it Star Wars now. This generated a lot of concern in capitals around the world. And one of those capitals was actually in France. President Francois Mitterrand, at the time, developed an initiative called Eureka, which was similar. It was to advance... France felt they needed to advance aerospace very quickly, but also a lot of other technology areas. 

China saw this and decided they also needed to advance. And at this time, China had just started reform and opening up. So they also needed to advance a lot of their science and technology. So they called it, "Hey, this can be known as China's eureka program." It ended up being known as Project 863, but within this project, it was an attempt to advance a lot of science technology across the country. This was proposed by a small group of very elite scientists to Deng Xiaoping, who was the leader of China at the time, and he agreed, and therefore this huge effort came to fruition. And you saw something similar where you had a small group of scientists propose China's first lunar mission. This actually also was in response to external events. Japan just launched a lunar over to probe and China felt they also needed to match that scientific achievement. 

So a group of scientists, a geologist known as Ouyang Ziyuan, as well as some others, got together, came up with a formulation for what China's first lunar mission might look like, what its scientific objectives might be, and things like that, and pitched it to higher and higher levels of government. And they were finally successful. They got it into the five-year budget and the project moved forward. It's not how every project advances, but it is how some fairly significant projects have advanced. Otherwise, in the general explanation of how projects advance is they can be proposed by institutes, by key scientists. They can come from some of the technology development that's required by some of the key state enterprises or some of their customers, say in the military and things like that. So there's a lot of sources for some of this. It's not all strictly top down. They don't necessarily always know exactly what missions they want to do. They have the general strategy that's top down, but some of the missions and some of the ways to solve some of the technical problems and scientific questions comes from the bottom up.

Casey Dreier: Does it tend to then ultimately be grounded in some sort of practical geopolitical or industrial need then, that they're slotting in a mission too? Are these purely these internal acceptable policy reasons for the Chinese political system? It seems like, "Oh, Japan launched a mission to the moon. Well, now we should do something like that." They find fertile ground first, maybe something that the scientific community wanted to do anyway, and they were able to then leverage and build that up. Or, "We need to develop capabilities and this helps stimulate this particular industrial base, therefore we can secure that support for that investment." Are there broader symbolic things that are coming into play with this or has that evolved? And again, there may be a distinction on the human and scientific side, but I guess I'm trying to think about when we see these reports about, okay, the scientific academy is putting out a long-range plan, they'll do a mission to Neptune and maybe X, Y, and Z missions that are going to start in 2030. How serious are we talking about and where do those get locked in? And what's driving them ultimately at this point?

Patrick Besha: I think in that respect, some of the mission proposals that are made in the US and China are a little bit similar because the scientists and the engineers that are involved in the proposal will often make those arguments. They might make an argument... And especially in the last two cases I mentioned, they made the argument that China needs to advance, back in the 1980s. "We need to advance to maintain a seat at the table and to maintain our parody with the great powers." They made the same argument in the early 2000s with the Chang'e Lunar Program where Japan had their own lunar orbit. "We have to do that too. We have to make sure. This is a geopolitical struggle." So they certainly do make those arguments. Now, whether or not they're decisive, they're generally just handed upward and whether or not the powers that be agree that they are geopolitically important, that's a different discussion. 

But we'd see the same thing in the US where some of our mission proposals say, "Hey, we really need to do this mission. Yes, the science is there. Yes, these are important scientific questions that need to be investigated, but we also think it has a geopolitical importance to it. We also think it has some economic benefits that you should be considering." And ultimately it's up to the leadership to decide whether or not those are in fact economic benefits they want to consider or geopolitical arguments.

Casey Dreier: What is the relationship then of these types of activities to the broad public in China? There's obviously a completely and radically different political system. It's not a democracy. You raise this idea... Or others raise this idea of there's an internal cultural resonance of how they name some of these projects. And you talk about this idea of national rejuvenation, which I think is a, again, I don't speak Mandarin, it seems like a much more loaded term or it has much more meaning than just that direct translation. Can you talk about how these are pitched and how the public's relationship is presented, or at least desired to be presented by the leadership of China?

Patrick Besha: So to be honest, we don't really have good insight into what the public thinks in China about their own space program. There have been surveys that have been conducted, but there's always a question-

Casey Dreier: Maybe it's like, how do they sell it with the expectation to the... When they report it, when it goes through official media outlets, we can probably determine some intent, at least from the leadership, of how they want it to be consumed. Would you agree with that?

Patrick Besha: Yeah, absolutely. So these are part of the propaganda for developing science and technology at a world-class level, becoming stronger, becoming a great power. And you can see this when senior leadership, Xi Jinping, and other major leaders will go and visit the mission control centers, and things like that, and they'll congratulate the teams on successful landing on the martian surface or the far side of the moon. And it is very much captured in the spirit of patriotism, of nationalism. These are great patriots that are supporting the Chinese space program. And you mentioned one thing, which was national rejuvenation. And so this is a complicated concept that is really starting to define the ideology of China's leadership at this time. So the idea is, within national rejuvenation, this is an attempt to make China a great space power. Make it a great power worldwide, but also a great space power. 

The way Xi Jinping has described this is that China has a 5,000-year long civilizational history. But starting with, say, the Ming Dynasty, they started adopting a policy of isolation back in the 1800s and missed a lot of the industrial evolution. That decline was accelerated by things like the opium war of 1840, and things like that. And it wasn't really until the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 that a lot of these trends of decline were beginning to be reversed. And so in his formulation, China's on an upward trajectory towards modernization, towards broad-based development.

Casey Dreier: Is it almost like regaining its rightful place in global affairs? Is that a way to phrase that?

Patrick Besha: That's right. And they would phrase it just like that. China's return to the center of the world, return to significant prominence. And core to the belief of, say, Xi Jinping, is that ancient China, Marxism, the Communist Revolution, and the modern technocratic state, which includes the space program, are all compatible, and it's all one long narrative of China as a country. And a lot of this includes also... Part of this is China's space program, and it's delivering benefits. It's raising the level of science technology in the country, and it's developing self-reliance. China can develop its own technology, and it doesn't need to rely on other external sources for it. So that's why a lot of the space programs and a lot of the space missions are so prominently featured, actually maybe compared to other countries worldwide, where you have such acute leadership attention to missions that land rovers on the lunar surface, and things like that.

Casey Dreier: Do you think it drives a desire to have more firsts or more, the old phrase, space spectaculars, but just very notable things like first time to land on the far side, landing on Mars for sample return, obviously humans, that seems wrapped up in this type of philosophy then, right?

Patrick Besha: 100%. I really do agree with that. I think China very much feels that these first ever types of achievements are core to becoming a great power and becoming a superpower at that level. If you look at the recent history, the last couple of decades, trying to spend a lot of time developing missions that in some ways replicated the historical achievements, so landing on the surface of the moon or putting an astronaut into orbit. And then more recently, it was matching some of these historical achievements. So landing a rover on the martian surface, only the second country in the world ever to do that successfully, after the United States. But I think what we're going to see next is missions that seek to surpass, and to develop first ever achievements in space. And these might include returning samples from Mars or the next generation of exoplanet observatories, things that the US is actually trying to do right now as well.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. I feel like when I did a little bit of work on this last year, looking at their scientific priorities, which are very similar, because again, you have the same objective reality out there, regardless, and it makes sense to go after the same things. But the way that it was phrased and framed, of, "We are going to make these breakthrough discoveries in these areas." And life beyond earth seems to be one of them and I would characterize them as big swing missions, where maybe they probably not likely to return the big result, but maybe they will. And if you do enough of them, you'll hit on something versus a much more conservative mindset to science, which seems to be dominating on the space science side of the US, and maybe some other aspects of so called Western world, or US allies, in terms of Europe. And that was, it seems to go right back to this point that we are setting up for this next century, the Chinese century, and we are now making these groundbreaking historical discoveries. And this is how we do it, is through space.

Patrick Besha: Yeah. I hope we think about it a little bit, is that China is making really bold missions here. They're going beyond and above what's been done before. They're also not afraid to engineer large scale projects. Some of the most significant projects right now are occurring in China. When we talk about just the level of organization required to develop, whether it's a massive hydroelectric dam or whether it's miles and miles, square miles, of solar panel fields, they're daring to think big. And I hope we continue to do that as well in the United States and not pursue incremental achievements, but to do the big things. And I think that's what NASA was made... That's why we developed NASA is to take the big swings, to go for the big science.

Casey Dreier: The consequences though for the failure have been so high for NASA. You've lived probably through a lot of this in your tenure there, that NASA is expected to do the big things, but perfectly the first time, and on budget or under budget for things we've never done before. And God forbid any one of those doesn't occur. We've had the political system punish that attitude recently and that the only experimentation seems to me to be allowed if you distance NASA from the contractor itself. So as long as there's a private company that's blowing up rockets, that's okay even if they're getting NASA money. But if NASA was blowing up rockets, Congress would be down your throat about it. Is there an inherent expectation mismatch here then of what NASA's being told to do versus the perception of what NASA should be doing?

Patrick Besha: Well, it is true. We have offloaded some of the risk, including some of the political risk on some of our missions to the private sector. Presumably NASA's reputational risk is reduced, although I think a lot of people when they see-

Casey Dreier: I think we've increased NASA's reputational risk quite a bit in some ways.

Patrick Besha: A lot of people don't sense a significant distinction between some of these commercial missions and what NASA does. But I think we have taken some big swings, the DART mission, the double asteroid redirect test. I'm glad DAVINCI and VERITAS are back on. The Dragonfly. So these are bold missions. So NASA is still doing very bold missions, which is very encouraging, but hopefully it's more across the board. And I hope we don't get penalized for some of these things. If you're going to experiment, if you're going to take the bold swings, you're going to have to fail. Sometimes you're going to fail. If you're not failing, then you're probably not taking a bold enough swing. So the question of risk at NASA is really fraught in how we assess risk and how much risk the agency should take on. It's a very complicated question, but it does get to the heart of selection missions and how we develop them these days.

Casey Dreier: How does China's space program, do you think, engage with risk in that sense? We just watched an interesting drama play out with their astronauts on their space station and having a damaged return capsule. Watching that, what did you take away from that experience that we just saw with this?

Patrick Besha: So China's actually very risk averse, possibly more so than NASA, to be honest. They've been very incremental in their development. They don't make great leaps, usually, or if they do-

Casey Dreier: Ironically.

Patrick Besha: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But if they do take a big step forward, they might do it on the second mission. And so you see this in, say, the Chang'e Lunar missions where the first mission, they don't take a lot of risk. The idea, that if they know their primary objective, maybe it's to put an orbiter around the moon, maybe it's the land on the surface, they're going to do that. They're going to do a few other key objectives, but then it's the second mission, which is essentially a duplicate. It's Chang'e-2, it's Chang'e-4 that takes the risk. That's where they introduce technology demonstrations. That's where they may have some secondary mission objectives, that you might lose a spacecraft. That's where they take the big risk. So it's very interesting to see that because they are finding ways to introduce risk that won't necessarily upend the apple cart on the first trial.

Casey Dreier: We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

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Casey Dreier: Moving back towards, let's say, human space flight and the moon, because that is now the big centralizing motivation right now. You were at NASA when Artemis was first established, and you just recently left NASA, but this has been Artemis for roughly seven years, I think, while you were there. One can argue whether SLS... We had a moon rocket that NASA maybe didn't want to admit, or at least the administration prior to that didn't want to admit it was a moon rocket for a long time. But how has the rhetoric around Artemis and its motivation, particularly vis-a-vis China, changed over those seven years, from the start to where our current point is? And I'll just raise as a point of example here. In September of 2025, the Senate Commerce Committee had a hearing called, There's a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race. 

So I feel like we're very much firmly into now a new space race territory, which to me feels like relatively recent increase of rhetoric around that. Is that, from your perspective, accurate? And have you seen that develop over the course of Artemis?

Patrick Besha: So I would say at the beginning stages when the program was just being formulated, there were roughly balanced imperatives. There was a sense that we're going to go back to the moon, it's going to be different this time. We're going to go, it's going to be sustainable, we're going to stick around, we're going to build infrastructure. It's going to be different from Apollo. But you also did have the imperative that, "Well, we need to get back there before China does." Because you could see China had a very long-term plan to go back to the moon and to put astronauts on the surface and to build infrastructure. It was fairly nascent at that time when Artemis was just being developed, but we had seen the entire progression of the Chinese lunar program for a decade or two at that point. So these were balancing considerations. 

I think it's right that the last couple of years, the imperative regarding beating China back to the moon has taken more prominence. It's become more heated. It's become the go-to rationale for it. Even though I think a lot of folks working on the program probably feel that some of the longer term sustainability and some of the longer-term development from lunar surface operations and things, maybe that's where the focus should be.

Casey Dreier: Do you think there's an inherent risk by that shift in rhetoric and expectations for Artemis? Because the whole point was that we don't do Apollo because Apollo, famously, didn't continue. We went six times, and like, "All right, you won the race. Congratulations." And an enduring long-term justification was the, I call this now the pace doctrine, in terms of why we go to the moon, as this coalition of allies and nations and science and commerce and what have you. And yes, geopolitical competition is part of that, but it's not the single defying thing. And I feel like we're starting now to see, well, maybe we give up the South Pole as our landing site. Maybe we simplify a lot of these things for the first landing. 

And all these benefits of the long-termism are starting to be maybe dropped away in order to frantically get boots and a flag on the ground again, which seems to be bad in terms of the overall stability of this program. I feel like we are entering risk. Is that something that you see as well? Or is it just so seductive to use geopolitics as the primary driver that we'll hope it's different this time?

Patrick Besha: It's a mix of both, right? I think we are mortgaging some of the long-term vision and some of the long-term goals for some immediate support. I think framing this as a space race of China may have some short-term benefit. It may not. It hasn't necessarily materialized all to... This did get a pretty significant plus up in some of the more recent discussions, but I think you're right. I think it can be a near-term thing, unless we're able to frame it more broadly, as more of a strategic competition with China that doesn't necessarily have an end date before 2030, it's going to continue for perhaps decades. It's going to include a lot of things, not just boots on the moon, but I like to frame it as so broad that it includes things, geopolitical considerations, economic considerations, national security, social and cultural impact, and science. Where's science in all of this? We should be-

Casey Dreier: I brought that up a few times. Yeah.

Patrick Besha: That's right's. Right. But that's part of the strategic competition as well, and it's an important part. And so we do need to maintain that cognizance of, at the 30,000 foot level, of all of these other considerations and not let some of the more immediate interests sweep those away.

Casey Dreier: For our listeners, and even for me at times, I'm just like, "Are we actually in a real space? What are the consequences of losing this?" I still have a hard time understanding, okay, China lands in 2030 or 20, whatever, and we haven't yet. What are the downsides? Because to me, well, I know some of the arguments out there, "Oh, well, they'll establish a fission reactor with a keep out zone and then they'll have a big swath of the moon and they'll have all the good resources." Well, you have to have a fission reactor first. You have to have a centralized source of resource. 

The moon seems pretty big to me. One landing somehow doesn't mean the end of this. So I don't understand necessarily this frantic shift to say, "We need to get our people back there first because if we don't, it'll forever be done." And that doesn't mean I don't believe there's some broader geopolitical great power competition at play here, but it doesn't seem dire in the way that even Apollo was pitched, which was obviously by the time it happened, not the primary situation. So first, are we in a space race? Do you agree with that framing?

Patrick Besha: I like to refer to it as a strategic space competition. The reason for that is a space race seems to connote an endpoint. You cross the line. I don't know where that line is. And so I don't know that there will be an endpoint, that we will know when we pass that. So I think it's going to be more of a competition and you're going to know... There's going to be certain periods, and they could be fairly long, where maybe we're not the superpower or we're not number one and someone else is, and then it shifts back and we reclaim it. I think there's just going to be a tension. It's going to be an ongoing competition for quite some time.

Casey Dreier: But what are we competing for, I guess, at this point?

Patrick Besha: Yeah. Yeah, so so you mentioned these idea of keep out zones, and things like that. Do you need to be first and what does that get you? So I think the rhetoric at this point is fairly significant, we should probably be first. I do want us to be first, but what does that actually get you? It is a concern to have these types of keep out zones, standard setting, and these types of things. If you plan to be there a long time, if you're going to have a long-term presence, then you should establish these things. And having a presence will certainly go a long way towards establishing these things. But we should also consider, when the Wright Brothers first flew the airplane, they weren't thinking of how do we develop protocols for landing around airports around the world, they just wanted to get there. They just wanted to test out the technology. They wanted to make sure that they could fly an airplane first and land there. 

And it's going to be a number of missions where they're like that. We didn't really develop a lot of these standards and protocols and everything until the advent of mass air travel. So I think we do have some time before a lot of these things come into play. Keep out zones are interesting. I think there is some probably highly desirable areas on the lunar surface that you could potentially get there, and you want to conduct your scientific investigations or your technology demonstrations without interference. But for a lot of these other things, let's make sure we can get there and we have a series of missions falling on. Right now, we don't really know what happens after Artemis 4. We have no idea of what the funding looks like. So it really has to be a fulsome effort and a long-term mission planning to understand how long we're going to be there, and then we can start integrating some of these other considerations.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. as you were talking there, I was reminded, and let's see if I remember my history correctly, but the Portuguese had the spice islands and then the Dutch, but then it was the British. And the British ultimately had them for a lot longer and then it was part of a much more impactful... Or New Amsterdam, which is now New York for the same reason. It didn't really matter in that case who was first, it mattered who was there the longest, in terms of their long-term global integration and consequence to the nations that occupied them. It's been a strange formulation to me, and this is where I do worry that this sudden shift to trying to race there is just setting NASA up also to lose. You know funding for these programs as well as anybody, but you look at the inflation adjusted curve for Apollo at its peak in 1966, just in Apollo, you're spending roughly $40 billion in 2025, adjusted dollars, just on Apollo. 

The plus up that Artemis got this year is on the order of a few billion to a total of nine, right? And that's the most it's ever had by a significant amount. We're not funding it like it's a real space race. It's been a big, flat, slow curve over the last 10 years, and we're now hoping that these commercial partners or private individuals basically will just chip in to help us reach this important national geostrategic goal. How serious are we really taking it if we can't actually even pay for it ourselves, and we just hope someone donates their rockets to making it do that? So this is like, it seems to me to be setting up NASA to fail because we haven't been funding it like a space race the last seven years, and we don't see many inclined to do it going forward.

Patrick Besha: Yeah. Well, I do really appreciate your work on the NASA budget and the Apollo budget. The articles you've published, it's fascinating stuff. I agree. And I think the buildup for Apollo was far more significant. Certainly we were starting at a lower level of development and maturity in terms of what sort of infrastructure we had, but yeah, it hasn't been the similar sharp rise in funding. I don't know that the commercial companies will take up the slack. It's probably an economic misunderstanding to think that commercial companies will pursue public goods and the development of some of these projects. If you want to explore the moons of Jupiter, that may be a public good that the government may have to pay for on behalf of the American people, and for national goals, but there may not be a profit motivation in that. In fact, there really probably isn't. 

And when you talk about some of these lunar missions and things like that, there could be some profit motives, there could be some market incentives for some of these missions. We see that with CLPS and things, but I don't know about long-term human presence. Well, we'll have to see how that shakes out.

Casey Dreier: Would you call CLPS a success?

Patrick Besha: It's been mixed so far, right? We're taking shots on goal, but it's been mixed so far. It's been very expensive for what they've achieved. Hopefully they will have some more successes coming up. I'd like to see that. I'd like to see the missions get more significant. I thought the cancellation of VIPER was unfortunate and that was going to be one of the more significant science missions to the lunar surface. So hopefully that'd be provided somehow. I'm not sure how.

Casey Dreier: From, I'd say the Chinese political perspective, would it mean anything to their plans if US astronauts landed first again, or do their plans continue? Does it have any impact at all?

Patrick Besha: No, I really think they will land, they'll continue. It won't affect the program.

Casey Dreier: That seems really, really important, right? And I think maybe this is one of my worries is that it's almost like we are, in the United States, when I say we, let's say the US political system, has decided that they're competing against almost like a caricature or a misunderstanding of the Chinese space program in this sense. Because what do we then gain if we... Okay, great, we're there first, we land, and it doesn't... If it changes nothing about the plans of your geopolitical competitor, then have you correctly assessed the situation? You would think that if it actually is a race and there is really importance to doing this first, there would be a change, theoretically, that they would have to revise or there'd be some consequence. But if there's not, what do we... 

Are we working ourselves up in a sense here, wanting or... I feel like there's always been this desire to return to Cold War 2.0, particularly with space because that's when all the money came, and we're seeing that to some degree right now. But otherwise, are we competing with a phantom here if there's no change in what China's plans would be?

Patrick Besha: Well, I think you're keying on some of the issue with calling this a space race.

Casey Dreier: And just to be clear, you haven't been out there calling this a space race.

Patrick Besha: No, no, no.

Casey Dreier: You're just an expert in some of these things. And you were on the inside at NASAs. This is keying up as you were there over the last few years.

Patrick Besha: Right. Well, when it was formulated as such, my advice was, let's not call it that. Because if you win, doesn't necessarily do all that much, where you already won the space race. And if you lose, then it really can be painful. And if you think, when we won the first space race, the benefits were very significant. It really ushered in a narrative of American exceptionalism for decades. It was a major achievement, and it still is. The second time we do that against a different adversary, it's not going to have the same impact, I don't think. The situation's not quite the same, historical circumstances are not the same. We've already been there. That's probably the most important thing. 

So we are on our own track where we want to go back to the moon, we want to develop this infrastructure and sustainability, we want to try out some new technologies, we want commercial to lead. All great stuff. I thought, "Great plan. We're doing it for our own reasons." And I think what we see now is a little bit of great power mirroring, where we stop taking the initiative and we pursue our own strategy for our own domestic reasons, or for why we want to pursue these reasons, and we start seeing what others are doing or reactive to what others are doing. And it can become a little bit of a loop in that sense where we all just reactive to each other rather than pursuing our own goals.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. You taken the words right out of my mind. That's what I have been more impressed on this, I'd say. I want, as an American, I'd like our space program to have its self-intrinsic value and needs and serve the needs of the nation as it is now and not be just a purely reactive set of goals. And arguably, Apollo was. And Eisenhower and a lot of his staff are very hesitant to engage on Khrushchev's playground, in that sense, because they were setting the context, they were setting the expectations, and the US should be leading on its own and be confident enough. Now, again, we got people on the moon for that, so fine. But I feel like we're drifting into this now reactionary posture. And I was thinking also, as you were talking about this, is this more a message that we, again, being the US and its alleys, want to send to ourselves that we're still capable of doing something like this? That it's almost a desire to show that we still have the juice, that we can still go back to the moon if we want. 

And we'll have these other motivations that we've all crammed in there to make it happen, but framing it and having this taste of maybe this great power competition again, just gets everyone revved up, and say, "Okay, now's the chance. We can get that inspiration, we can re-achieve that period of our history." It's almost like seeking out nostalgia, which again is not the healthiest mental place to be in, nor is it the best way to frame a whole space program out. And again, I'm being a bit extreme on this because I still want us to go to the moon, but just this particular framing almost seems like it's a way to convince us self-identity is still valid.

Patrick Besha: Yeah. I think there's something to that. I think we still want the narrative of American exceptionalism to exist. We still want that to be true. The Apollo missions were highly symbolic and we want to reclaim some of that symbolism, some of that sense of prestige and America's place in the world. So we have chosen landing back on the moon to serve that function. It may be a little bit more muted than the first time around, but it's still going to be great if we were to get back first. And it'll be a big deal. And hopefully it helps foreshorten the other narrative, which is fairly big in China right now, which is that the US is somehow in decline and China's on the rise. We don't want that to take hold, which, not getting there first could potentially feed into those types of perceptions.

Casey Dreier: Well, we've almost created now the conditions for that symbolic loss in that framing by not approaching it from the beginning that way and now layering it on at the end. In terms of the upcoming Chinese approach, could almost you argue, does China actually almost want to encourage this framing by the US in hopes that we will overreact? Is that too much four-dimensional chess thinking on this? Are they pleased to see a rapid turn and shifting around, like, "Well, maybe we'll go to the Mars instead, and that'll be the big thing."? "Well, no, no, actually, sorry, we're going to build the moon base." And just whipsawing around helps then, it reinforces this dynamic that you just outlined in a bit. Is there any intentionality on that or are they just sitting back and watching?

Patrick Besha: I think it's an interesting thesis. I don't think they're playing that-

Casey Dreier: You can just say no.

Patrick Besha: I don't think they're playing that kind of four-dimensional chess. No, I think they're probably just as surprised as the scientific community when they see a superpower slashing its science technology funding.

Casey Dreier: Self-emulating its own scientific capabilities. Yeah.

Patrick Besha: I think they're surprised. But they're going to continue advancing on their own. Maybe they'll plus up their own science technology.

Casey Dreier: There's been significant growth in the last 10 years, as we talked about. How brittle is China's plans in the sense of being tied to Xi Jinping? He seems to have really established himself a more centralized authority. We actually just saw a big purge of the military. We talked about these ideas of national rejuvenation, and it seems very tied to his... And a lot of their men, even arguably their manufacturing policies are really tied to his particular understanding about national power and strength, but also this cultural nostalgia and desire to return China to this central place via these highly symbolic acts. Is that brittle on that sense? Is it now reflecting almost his personal worldview about what does it mean to be a great power, people who grew up and saw a moon landing happen at some stage, reflecting now from that?

Patrick Besha: Well, I think he has been a very strong advocate and proponent for China's space program, but more broadly, a very strong centralized state, a very strong military. He's really been a proponent of a lot of these things. And so I think the space program survives and exists if he were to leave power. But I think some of the truly civilizational, first ever in the history of the world type achievements, I think some of the impetus to reach for those might go away. It might be lessened. I think Xi Jinping is really gearing folks up to take those really big swings, the thousand-year swings. And so you might lose some of that momentum, but I think they will continue. I don't see it as particularly brittle. They generally set things into motion and they carry through with a lot of them. 

The entire scheme of how to develop infrastructure on the moon, we'll see if that comes to fruition. There are plans that go out to 2050 and 2060 and these things, we'll have to see. But I think they're quite confident that they'll achieve the landings and then there will be the International Lunar Research Station, at least the beginning parts of that.

Casey Dreier: Can you just quickly summarize what that is for listeners?

Patrick Besha: Yeah. So China's really been building, starting with their first lunar mission, Chang'e, Chang'e 1, which just orbited the moon. They always split that up into three phases. They're going to orbit and they're going to land on the surface, and then they're going to pick up samples and return them. So orbit and land, return, three main phases. And that took us up to Chang'e 6, basically. Chang'e 5 or 6. Chang'e 5 and 6 were the return sample missions. And they completed those just recently. 2024 was the last one. And now there's the fourth phase of the lunar program, and that's the International Lunar Research Station. Sometimes it's called ILRS. This will include upcoming missions like Chang'e 7 and Chang'e 8, and then IORS dedicated missions. And this will be developing infrastructure on the lunar surface, power systems, dropping cargo, developing logistics routes, and scientific investigations. And maybe vision sources on the surface, a pretty expansive vision of how it all might work, including communications and satellites in orbit to provide communications relays, and things like that. 

So it's a very expansive vision of what a infrastructure on the surface would look like. It wouldn't be permanently inhabited. It would be probably intermittently inhabited with astronauts. They would touch down and they would leave. But it would be a pretty dramatic testing ground for things like autonomous vehicles, for how can AI actually do some of the work on the surface for scientific investigations? How can robots do the tending of these laboratories on the lunar surface? It'd be pretty amazing to see that if it were to all come to fruition. We're thinking of similar things, and I hope ours comes to fruition as well. But this is what the 20, 30 year plan envisions, it's quite bold.

Casey Dreier: Before we go, I want to touch on one more topic that you raised in your testimony to the House of Representatives last year, which I thought was really... I'd never considered before, but seemed actually maybe more of an actual direct threat in some ways to US manufacturing capabilities for aerospace. You talked about this idea of in a number of markets, China has basically overwhelmed the global industrial base by driving down prices, like in solar power batteries. We're seeing this now with electric vehicles. And basically, it makes it financially infeasible to have domestic production capabilities unless there's really strong tariffs or incentives or national security concerns. But then they centralize the manufacturing capability in China, which then gives them enormous leverage globally. And so you talked about this in terms of aerospace, and as space is becoming more commoditized, particularly with large distributed satellite communications networks, rocket launches, components, what have you, you identified this as a more practical potential threat. 

So I want to just explore this a little bit with you. Where do you see... Is this an intentional, you think, strategy currently being deployed, and where are we seeing this in terms of both China's industrial base and also its growing commercial space sector?

Patrick Besha: So in terms of space manufacturing... And when I was at NASA, I actually had a big survey looking at the US industrial base and supply chain, trying to understand what some of our advantages were, and things like that. So the US does have advantages, and we see that in some of the great innovations that we see some commercial companies doing. Reusability is just one of them. And with satellite constellations, we also have been pioneering large scale industrial production of satellites, not just a single one-off, a bespoke satellite, but dozens, hundreds, soon to be thousands. And this is really the frontier of space manufacturing right now. And we're seeing China do something very similar. Where China has certain advantages is in their industrial capacity and their ability to manufacture spacecraft and spacecraft components, and things like that. There's only one place in the world that can produce a million iPhones in one a week, and it is China. 

And how do they develop this type of advantage? It took years to develop it. And as part of that process of expanding and trying to figure out where the efficiencies were in the production manufacturing process, they developed what's often called process knowledge, and also how to improve industrial processes to get better and better and better and faster and faster and more efficient, and introduce innovations and things like that along the way. And so China's really good at that, as we've seen, produce more solar panels than anybody else. They're doing that in electric vehicles right now, and soon they'll be doing it in space as well. And so when we're talking about 10, 20,000, 30,000 satellite constellations, China will be able to iterate very quickly, not only build that initial build out of these satellites, but iterate very quickly, develop advances and swap them out and tailor things very quickly. 

So this is really an advantage that they have. And they can drive prices down extremely. And we saw that with solar panels, which is something I've looked at in the past as well. When China entered the market, they didn't care about loss-leaders. The government was subsidized, a lot of these companies exorbitantly pushed the prices down. A lot of these companies didn't survive, they went bankrupt, but they developed processes along the way that were then absorbed by other companies. And so now a lot of the biggest solar panel manufacturers are in China. Could see something similar with whether it's launch vehicle technology, whether it's satellite manufacturing, whether it's some other upstream components that factor into production of satellites. Now, that's just generally China's industrial policy approach, but there is something that is relevant here, which is something called military civil fusion. 

And this is a policy that China's had for a couple of years, where they really want to try to capture whatever's going on in the commercial sector that is innovative or interesting, that is working really well, capture that and spin it into the military or spin it into the government programs. And at the same time, if there's something innovative happening in the military, spin it off into commercial. So you have that interplay. China didn't come up with this. Actually, the seeds of this were really developed by the United States. We used to call it civil military integration. But it was basically post World War 2 when Vannevar Bush helped set up the government industry academia triangle, where the government would provide a lot of the basic RMD funding, industry would develop a lot of the products, academia would focus on fundamental RMD, and things like that. It's very, very useful. A lot of the interplay between these three constituencies was very useful. 

And you also had industry develop a lot of really fantastic basic RMD. Bell Labs is a great example of that. They developed the transistor, the photovoltaic cell, some of the early radio astronomy experiments, right? Those industry doing basic RMD. It was AT&T. At the time they had been given a monopoly over all of the communications. So in return, they did some basic-

Casey Dreier: They had some money to throw around for basic RMD.

Patrick Besha: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. But just amazing. And this is really the... We look back at these days and say, "Wow, this was really when we were innovating. We were developing the transistor, the semiconductor, the basis of our modern world." But it was that interplay between all these various functions, and this led to Silicon Valley as well. Of course, one of the aerospace companies, things like that. So China very much studied this system and incorporating it. It looks a little bit different than it does in the US, but that's just because their system is different. It's set up differently, historical circumstance. But this is essentially what's going on, much more heavy-handed in China. The military civil fusion policies in the US is a little bit of take it or leave it. If it's a benefit to you, you can do it, but if not... But in China, it's more, "You're going to do this." It's a bit more direct.

Casey Dreier: I guess what is the counter policy then? Is it just purely asserting national security interests? Now we can't buy, I think, Chinese components to put into the most aerospace systems. I guess there's a global issue beyond the United States, but what counter policy is there to just increase US production and try to keep pace, form alliances?

Patrick Besha: Yeah. Well, I think the way this is typically framed is, you can either create higher barriers, so you can create more stringent export controls, create the barriers, and so US technology stays onshore, and that type of thing. The other way to do it is to out innovate, is to pour funding into RMD and science technology, and just stay ahead of the curve, and keep funding. And process these innovations as they come in, do a better job of spinning off technologies from government to industry, and then a better job of spinning on from industry into government. Generally, we need export control regimes. I think they're very important, but I'm generally in favor of out innovating and producing progress rather than...

Casey Dreier: Right. Putting in a moat and... Yeah.

Patrick Besha: Yeah. There won't be anything to protect with our moat if we're not constantly innovating and investing.

Casey Dreier: For listeners who want to follow this and be able to follow this at a more sophisticated level, first, how important is it to speak Mandarin in order to follow the actual news and understand some of the nuances in terms of coming out of China space progress and development, both on the science and human space alliance side?

Patrick Besha: Well, so I teach at Georgetown as an adjunct professor. I do encourage students to study Mandarin Chinese. I did myself. I lived in China. I've been studied for years. I think it's very helpful. And it's also helpful, not just simply the language, but understanding the culture, the society, where they're coming from, can help you avoid some misperceptions or just assuming they're just like us. I think one of the bigger issues right now is assuming China behaves the same way America behaves. They really do not, but it can lead you to just assuming a lot of intentions and motivations that may not be there. Sometimes the media does get some things wrong, where they review what's going on in China. There was an example a couple of years ago of a wire service, I won't mention which one, that picked up something, the Chinese press, and developed an article about it that said China is planning to go to Mars. Human missions to Mars by 2030, 2029 was going to be the launch. 

And it created a pretty significant interest in the US and it was published widely. But I went back and looked at what the source material was and it was from a legitimate source. It was from the major launch manufacturer in China. But what the leader of that organization was doing was explaining the periods of conjunction and opposition for Mars and when these might make ideal times to transit with the human mission. And so we had 2029, every 26 months, he had a pretty optimal window. And so it got pulled into the US media as they're planning a bunch of missions, and some of the best ones are coming up in the next two years, next four years. So there can be some misperceptions and then miscommunication that can happen.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. So how do we be savvy consumers of this information? What are common misconceptions, I guess, that either our media or ourselves or elected officials tend to have about China space program that we should all keep in mind as we see the news progress over the next few years?

Patrick Besha: China's space program is not necessarily monolithic. There are different actors with different priorities and competing interests. And so when we see something in the news, we shouldn't necessarily assume that whoever's speaking speaks for the entire program and that this is in fact a long-term strategy or this is the plan. There is a diversity. There is a plurality of opinion and influence within the Chinese system, less so than the United States, but there are actors in the system that compete with each other that have public pronouncements in order to advance a certain position or to advocate for a certain mission or program line. And so it can be confusing to understand whether or not this is actually the actual state's government's plan or whether or not this is just an actor proposing something that they'd like to see happen. Which we do see, proposing missions that are more like wishlists than confirmed and funded.

Casey Dreier: Right. And that's easy to then, how do you know which one is which? And so there's, I guess, a bit of a skepticism in terms of some of those pronouncements, seems to be a good practice.

Patrick Besha: And it can create an echo chamber where, "Oh no, we heard China's doing this amazing thing that are going to fly human missions to Mars. Well, we better do the same thing." So there needs to be some consideration of the sources and how real it is.

Casey Dreier: As we go forward in the next few years, what will you be watching for to assess China's progress in both moon, space science and other aspects of space?

Patrick Besha: Well, as we mentioned previously, I think the next few years is really the period where the Chinese space program will advance into a period of attempting first ever type missions. So really pushing the boundaries, pushing the frontiers of technology. So I'll be looking for those missions, not missions that they've already done or that others have done, but where does China do the first thing we've ever seen a space program do before? That's going to be really interesting. So I hope we're there. I hope we're doing the same missions. I hope we're doing those missions, to be honest.

Casey Dreier: I don't think we can just claim we're in a space race and then decide that the rest of the solar system doesn't count, and only the moon does, while we cancel everything else. That doesn't make consistent sense to me.

Patrick Besha: That's right.

Casey Dreier: I guess we made it through this year, barely, and hopefully cooler heads will prevail. Patrick Besha, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this. Maybe we can check in with you in a few years and see where we are, how much progress has or hasn't been made, and if we're still in a race and who's won or not.

Patrick Besha: That'd be great. I'm glad to. Thanks. Appreciate it.

Casey Dreier: We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others in the meantime learn more about space policy and The Planetary Society by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds and that will help them find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us, including me, your thoughts and questions at [email protected] or if you're a Planetary Society member, and I hope you are, leave me a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our online member community. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers of the show. 

Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Me, Casey Dreier, and Merc Boyan, my colleague, composed and performed our space policy edition theme. The Space Policy Edition is a production of The Planetary Society, an independent nonprofit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California. We are membership based and anybody, even you can become a member. They start at just $4 a month, that's nothing these days. Find out more at planetary.org/join. Until next month, ad astra.