A couple years ago, an executive at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne told me about an unexpected problem they were encountering. New graduates in aerospace were beginning to think of SpaceX as the old, boring commercial space company. He said this after we’d walked through the busiest spaceflight facility I’d ever seen, where, at 2am, workers were turning wrenches on rocket engines as though it was two in the afternoon. If that was boring, I just couldn’t imagine what exciting would look like.
For most of my life, NASA and a couple old guard contractors with World War 2 and Apollo moon mission lineage were the only games in town when it came to space. Today, it’s not hard to find a company building flight hardware whose entire engineering team could fit in a car. There are a lot of jobs out there, even if the places hiring are different than they used to be.
And the demand for workers is about to go nova. It turns out that we’re in a moon race.
NASA BLEEDING TALENT
These are hard times for the federal workforce, which last year lost 13% of its workers. Some were fired, some quit, and some retired. Others looked at the ongoing instability and sudden, surprising lack of federal job security and chose deferred resignation.
The space sector shed five thousand federal workers at all levels. The loss of experience and institutional knowledge is immeasurable. Despite quantum leaps in technology, spacecraft still look about the same today as they did in the 1960s—and mostly work the same way, too. That’s why it’s useful to have that one grumpy old person in your meetings. They probably solved your problem 40 years ago. We already know NASA will pay the price for the loss of experience. The only questions are how steep a price, and where will that lost talent go?
THE ARTEMIS PROGRAM
First, let’s survey the landscape. The overall organizing purpose of NASA today is the Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface. It is the first such post-Apollo human spaceflight program to survive multiple presidential administrations. That’s a big deal. George H.W. Bush sought a space station to moon to Mars program call the Space Exploration Initiative. Bill Clinton killed it, going all-in on the International Space Station. George W. Bush broadly pursued another space station-moon-Mars program, called Constellation. Barack Obama killed that, preferring to go to an asteroid, and one day, Mars. Donald Trump killed that, proposing a moon mission by 2024, which NASA called Artemis. Joe Biden continued Artemis, and Trump has as well in his second term.
However, Artemis has been starved of funding from the start, and saddled by Congress with bad planning and nonstarter architectures. The Gateway space station, which would orbit the moon, is deep in development. It has been useful for attracting international buy-in to Artemis, but is fragile as a matter of domestic politics. The Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, whose origins reach back to Constellation, have cost about $50 billion so far. They’re magnificent jobs programs, but haven’t launched humans yet. But at least they’ve launched!
SpaceX, meanwhile, undercut its competition for the lunar lander contract, promising a Rube Goldberg concept requiring about 15 sequential Starship launches for a single crewed moon landing. (All those launches are to park hundreds of tons of cryogenic fuel in space, and perform on-orbit refueling, which has never been done. Indeed, just keeping the fuel from boiling off in direct sunlight would be an astounding achievement.) That single landing will require a hundred ton starship to alight the lunar surface vertically. (The Apollo lander was 15 tons, for comparison.) Then SpaceX will have to relaunch that same hundred-ton lander to get astronauts back to the return vehicle. (The Apollo ascent stage was about five tons.)
This was never going to fly by 2024. Indeed, it won’t be ready by 2028, either, which is the new deadline. (Blue Origin also has a crewed lunar lander in development, and it will not be ready until at least 2030.) We pinned our hopes and national ambitions on Elon Musk, who basically sold us a monorail. One day, no doubt, it will work, which would have been a good enough timeline if the U.S. were the only game in town. Unfortunately, we’re not. We’re in a moon race, and the American people are about to learn this in a big way.
A NEW MOON RACE
In the 21st century, China has built a disciplined, serious lunar exploration program. They achieved their first soft landing on the lunar surface: a rover, in 2013. Six year later, they achieved the first-ever graceful landing on the far side of the moon. In 2020, they returned samples from the lunar surface—the first such collection of moon rocks since the 1970s. They returned samples from the lunar far side in 2024, as well as emplacing their third moon rover. In addition, they’ve flown two moon-mapping orbiters, and have two active communications relay orbiters.
Landing on the moon, operating on the moon, taking off from the moon, and returning from the moon are each very hard in their own right. They are also the prerequisites for landing humans on the moon and bringing them back home, which China has long vowed to do by 2030. The Chinese lunar architecture is unified and centrally-planned. Each step enriches the next.
In comparison, the United States has gone all-in on commercial lunar landers. Two have landed successfully: Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus in 2024, and Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost in 2025. Neither of these companies are part of the U.S. crewed program. They’re devoted to delivering scientific payloads on behalf of the U.S. government. (Essentially, they’re Uber Eats, for the moon.) These are excellent companies and their landings are triumphs by every measure—but they in no way advance, say, SpaceX’s human lander. The American program has parallel tracks (the SpaceX lander, the Blue Origin lander, the various commercial cargo landers, and small sat projects), none of which really feed into each other.
WHERE THE MONEY IS MADE
If this multi-track process works, NASA and American corporations will eventually have many paths to the moon. But it is taking a lot longer than anyone seemed to expect. Rather than becoming routine, each successful American moon landing still feels like a miracle.
I think in the back of every red-blooded American’s mind, there is the certainty that if push comes to shove in a moon race against China, we’ll pull out a win at the last minute. And I’m here to tell you we are past the last minute. Americans need to start preparing themselves psychologically for the Chinese flag on the lunar surface before the return of an American one.
When that happens, Washington D.C. is going to go haywire. The same senators who encumbered NASA with a series of bad programs will start demanding answers. The same presidents who cut NASA funding at every opportunity will lament how the opposing party sabotaged everything. (There’s plenty blame to go around.)
But what everyone will agree on is we need to fix this problem, and fast.
There’s an old saying that you can do things good, fast, and cheap—but you can only pick two. The Apollo program was good and fast, but it wasn’t cheap. Since Apollo, we’ve generally chosen good and cheap when it comes to space. (Americans spend more annually on fantasy football than we do on the Artemis program.) Once we decide to run the moon race, good and fast will become the fashion.
HOW WE SPEND MONEY IN SPACE
Though figures vary wildly, taxpayers have spent at least $20 billion commercializing low-Earth orbit (LEO). This is widely regarded as a success, but in truth, no meaningful non-government market has yet emerged. Aside from the U.S. government, SpaceX’s biggest customer is… SpaceX, to launch Starlink satellites. In fact, if you take Starlink launches out of the equation, spaceflight looks a lot like it did a decade ago, except that Americans no longer must hitch rides on Russian rockets.
A lot of people are betting that other markets will emerge, and the U.S. government is attempting to commercialize cis-lunar space, and the lunar surface, much as it has LEO.
There are two upshots of all this. First, there is no shortage of desire by the U.S. government to keep pumping money into the private sector for space exploration, regardless of success. Second, as China continues its utter domination of lunar exploration, the government will want, more than ever, to somehow one-up the Chinese. They’re going to get there first. So we have to get there second, but better. It makes an American moon base plausible. You’ll need to give those astronauts something to do up there, and the only thing to do up there is science.
That’s at least slightly encouraging news for all those scientists and engineers who lost their jobs and funding last year. A lot of money is about to start flowing to the private sector, because that’s the only way we know how to explore space anymore. Companies won’t even have to work very hard to build independent economies. Uncle Sam will have his checkbook open for at least a decade.
THE DEPARTMENT OF THE EXTERIOR
The moon race is not the only place we’ll be spending money in space, of course. There’s also the military. The Space Force budget exceeds the NASA budget, in part, a reflection of renewed, if misplaced, efforts to build an intercontinental ballistic missile defense shield. (We’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars on such a system since the 1980s, and fifty years later, not only do we lack an intercontinental ballistic missile defense shield, but we are basically starting over.)
There is no reason to think it will work this time. There have been no technological breakthroughs, or shifts in the laws of physics. The price of defending against a nuclear attack versus the price of deploying countermeasures for our defenses is called the cost-exchange ratio. And the cost-exchange ratio is far too high for a missile defense shield to ever make sense. Likewise, no shield will ever be 100% effective—which it has to be. Otherwise, we’re headed down a path where we bankrupt ourselves to make a shield before the first nuke is ever launched. And then once it is, we’re not only still bankrupt, but now we also have to rebuild an obliterated New York or Washington.
But if the government insists on spending the money, some enterprising engineers and physicists are certainly going to have good days. And on the bright side, there are societal benefits to all this.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—the missile defense shield that never materialized in the 1980s—proved to be a stealth Apollo program, advancing the miniaturization of computers, improvements in flight hardware, communications systems, and just generally subsidized a lot of the aerospace industry. The reason NASA’s billion dollar missions were suddenly ten times cheaper in the 1990s is because we’d already spent hundreds of billions of dollars on SDI development, and that hardware finally filtered down to NASA and the private sector.
SECOND PLACE IN THE MOON RACE, BUT BETTER
The Soviet Union launched the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. This ignited the Space Race. Then the Soviets launched the first human, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. Both events caused massive damage to the American psyche (and particularly, to the psyche of lawmakers watching the Reds seize the “high ground”). Afterward, the United States vowed never again to be second in space. And for more than sixty years, we’ve succeeded in that.
I don’t like the idea of the United States faltering on something so important as space, and particularly a moon race. But it’s OK to make a terrible mistake if you learn from it. We’re about to be embarrassed on the world stage in spectacular fashion.
What happens next might teach us anew what “exciting” really looks like.
