The new space race between China, Russia, and the US is heating up, with both sides eyeing the Moon’s South Pole for future lunar bases. While the US focuses on its Artemis program and lunar gateway, China and Russia are accelerating plans for their own base, the International Lunar Research Station. As the race for resources like helium-3 intensifies, political and military tensions in space could have far-reaching consequences for global security.
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here.
By RW Johnson  ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
A week ago General Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force (set up by President Trump in 2019, it is now one of the six US Commands[1]) warned Europeans that China was putting military capabilities into space at “a mind-boggling rate”. For the China-US space race is already a far more intense reality than is generally realised and the US wants all the European co-operation that it can get. Already in 2021 General David Thompson, also of the US Space Force, had warned that “The fact that in essence, on average, they (the Chinese) are building and building and updating their space capabilities at twice the rate that we are means that very soon, if we don’t start accelerating our development and delivery capabilities, they will exceed us.”
This makes this space race very different than the old one with the Russians. Effectively that ended when the US easily beat the USSR to the Moon in 1969. Russia was already an exhausted superpower, its economy hardly growing and technologically far behind the US. Indeed, At the time the USSR denied that there even was any race to the Moon.
In fact there was. Just three days before Apollo 11 took off with Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins aboard, the USSR launched the (unmanned) Luna 15 rocket with the aim of landing it on the Moon before the Americans got there. But Luna 15 began to misbehave in lunar orbit and ultimately – after 52 orbits – it crashed onto the Moon just after Armstrong and Aldrin had performed their moonwalk heroics for the cameras and had taken off again back to Earth. It was only during glasnost in 1989 that Russia displayed the (never used) landing craft which had been intended to get their cosmonauts to the Moon first and admitted that there had been a race.
This time NASA’s effort centres on the Artemis programme which aims to return to the Moon around 2030. The plan is to establish a spacecraft in permanent elliptical orbit around the Moon, the Lunar Gateway. At its nearest point it will almost skim the Moon, masking it easy for astronauts to land on the lunar surface, while at the other end of its ellipse it will be close to Earth, making it easy for astronauts to board it. European and Canadian space ships, as well as NASA’s, are expected to use this Gateway.
Meanwhile the US has managed to get several dozen countries to sign the Artemis Accords (2020). And whereas the old UN Outer Space Treaty had said that space was “the province of all mankind”, the Accords specifically allow for countries to mine the Moon for minerals for their own benefit. China and Russia are both excluded from the Accords. Ultimately, the plan is to establish a permanent lunar base which in turn will then be used to launch a manned mission to Mars.
The US could have been miles ahead: President George Bush Sr. wanted to establish a Moon base and aim for Mars but Congress wouldn’t hear of it. On the other hand the Moon has been thoroughly mapped in the interim and we know a lot more about it now. Had the US built a base earlier it might well have settled for somewhere near the Moon equator in the Sea of Tranquillity, where Armstrong and Aldrin landed, but this would have been a mistake. During the day there the temperature rises to 127C and during the lunar night it falls to -179C. This extreme fluctuation is the problem: it would soon wreak havoc with almost any materials, steel included.
Moreover, quite a lot of countries have now orbited the Moon or even landed on it. In 2022 it emerged that samples collected by the robotic rover launched from China’s Chang’e 5 rocket had discovered an entirely new mineral, Changesite-(Y). This was exciting enough but nothing compared to the discovery by India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter in 2008 that there were probably large amounts of water deposited at the lunar poles. Later a Chandrayaan-3 rocket became the first ever to land at the Moon’s south pole.
The discovery of water was crucial. It meant that the water could be broken down, providing oxygen to breathe and also provide the constituents for rocket fuel. This immediately launched thoughts of a lunar base – which obviously had to be at one of the poles, with the south pole universally favoured. Moreover, it appears that the Moon has significant deposits of titanium, silicon, rare earths and other minerals.
In addition it seems likely that there are extensive amounts of helium-3, which hardly exists on Earth and which costs $17,000 a gram because it is the indispensable fuel for nuclear fusion – once we work out how to do nuclear fusion. It is thought there may be enough helium-3 on the Moon to provide clean energy for the whole of Earth for the next 10,000 years. As may be imagined, such reports had the effect of greatly energising both private and state interests: thar’s gold in them thar hills and whoever wins the race back to the Moon will have first pick.
The Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin is an extreme place, 2500 km wide and 13 km deep. It has mountains so high which, because of the tilt of the Moon’s axis, are in bright sunlight for 80% of the time – which, of course, holds out great potential for solar-powered electricity. But many of its craters are so deep that the sunlight never reaches their lower areas and it is here that large amounts of ice will be found. Amazingly, these are the coldest places in the entire solar system, with temperatures falling to as low as -238C. So, pretty clearly the job will be to melt the ice using solar derived electricity, storing the resulting water in large underground caverns which will need to be excavated and oxygen in tanks which will also need to be underground.
Indeed, everything will have to be underground and inhabitants of the lunar base will live like moles. This is essential not merely to protect everything and everybody from temperature extremes but, above all to shield them from the ferocious solar radiation which would quickly fry both humans and any electronic machinery, and also from the continuous bombardment of meteors of all shapes and sizes. For the Moon has neither Earth’s atmosphere or magnetic field to protect it. One result is that the entire surface of the Moon is covered by regolith, a fine dust which is far sharper and more abrasive than sand. However, it has its advantages: a good covering of regolith will insulate the lunar base from radiation and by baking the regolith to high temperatures it should be possible to extract water vapour from it and thus oxygen and hydrogen. NASA has already found a number of possible sites for a lunar base within 6 degrees’ latitude of the south pole. Each of these sites is 15km x 15km and has multiple possible landing sites.
In 2021 China and Russia agreed together to build a lunar base, also at or near the Moon’s south pole, to be known as the International Lunar Research Station, which may be used by other countries as well. (The UAE, although a signatory of the Artemis Accords, has also committed to joining the ILRS and no doubt there will be others trying to play both sides of the street.) Initially the plan was for three crewed missions to reconnoitre possible landing sites by 2026, followed by landings on the Moon and a habitable moonbase established by 2036. Last year China moved that timetable up, saying a Chang’e 8 rocket would land on the Moon in 2028 carrying a robot designed to 3D print bricks made from lunar soil.
President Biden has shown little interest in space and immediately after his election handed on responsibility for space matters to Kamala Harris, just as he also put her in charge of the border question. The result, in both cases, was that nothing much got done. Ms Harris seems to be an ineffectual woman and she was doubtless much pre-occupied by the 90%+ staff turnover in her office: almost no one wanted to work with her for long.
The upshot is exactly what one might have expected. Whereas in the past most astronauts have been military and men, there is now to be a deliberate diversity policy, so of the 18 astronaut candidates selected, only ten are actively serving military types, while nine are women and four are people of colour. So great emphasis is laid on the fact that NASA will guarantee that both a woman and a person of colour will walk on the Moon. In other words politically correct identity politics on the Moon. This seems to be the only discernible priority. Meanwhile the Artemis plan dates have slipped several times and there is no certainty about when exactly it will all happen.
So the current situation is that both the US and allies on the one hand, and China-Russia on the other, are aiming to set up rival lunar bases in the same south polar region but without any agreement between them or any joint legal framework to govern how their competition should unfold. This is dangerous enough but, of course, on top of that there is a military angle on both sides. A now declassified US document discussed the building of a military base on the Moon, housing an Earth Bombardment System. It would be extremely surprising if China-Russia is not thinking the same thoughts. I shall return to some of these questions in a second part of this article.
Read also:
