What does the success of China’s moon sampling mission mean for the US-China space race?

China on Tuesday claimed success in retrieving the first samples from the far side of the moon to Earth – a boost for the country’s space program amid growing competition with the US.

The Chang’e-6 lunar module landed in China’s Inner Mongolia province carrying up to 2 kilograms of lunar dust and rocks. It is the only land to have successfully landed on the far side of the moon, which researchers say could hold clues to its formation and details about the resources it might contain.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called the event a “landmark achievement in our country’s efforts to become a space and technological power.”

It is the latest space success for a country that is increasingly attracting US attention

“I made it clear in my comments that we are in a space race with the Chinese, and they are very good,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson recently told The Washington Post. “They have had a lot of success, especially in the past ten years. They usually say what they mean, and do what they say.”

Both countries want to land humans on the moon in the coming years, with current timelines predicting the US will get there first. But NASA’s Artemis mission, which aims to land Americans on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, has already faced delays.

The stakes of this space race are “much higher,” said Peter Garretson, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council who focuses on space and defense. There are concerns that China’s objectives in space may not be purely diplomatic in nature and that the moon’s potential resources are there for the taking.

“NASA is called to return to its roots as a central organization advancing strategic objectives in both a new space race and a new cold war where the stakes are much higher and where the wealth of the inner solar system can decide the future of free societies or autocracies prevail,” says Garretson.

Garretson says that while Nelson acknowledged a space race with China, NASA is not acting with the same urgency as the first time, when it competed with the Soviet Union.

“Although the United States clearly has an overall lead in terms of industrial base, knowledge and technology at this particular moment, we are playing the Chinese tortoise and essentially allowing them to follow us quickly,” Garretson said.

In a possible sign of global cooperation, China has offered to share at least some of its lunar samples with scientists, and NASA has encouraged the country’s funded researchers to sign up.

“This seems to be an approach from China that is about recognizing the importance of international cooperation in space exploration,” said Mai’a Cross, director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures at Northeastern University.

However, there is reason to be cautious, she says.

“I wouldn’t necessarily take it all at face value, because we know that the Chinese military is heavily involved in any space exploration initiative,” Cross said. “But at the same time, we have this opportunity now, with space not being weaponized yet, to really try to lean much more into the nature of scientific achievement.”

She adds that “however much we can encourage this kind of tone and this approach to space exploration, the better.”

Cross says more needs to be done “in terms of laws and standards to have high confidence in how countries approach lunar resources.”

She points to advancing – and possibly involving China – the Artemis Accords, a series of non-binding agreements between NASA and other countries to “guide future cooperative activities” in space.

“There is concern that if China and the US compete to go to the moon, and one of them leads the way in identifying and then using resources that are on the moon, this will more or less leave the other country behind.” from reaching the moon. access to those resources,” says Cross.