10/25/2025

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By Dan Robitzski

Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.

Planning for Chinese crews to reach the moon first

If you're a regular reader of our opinion section, you know that a great deal of brainpower has been dedicated to figuring out this new space race between the United States and China to send a crew to the moon and establish a long-term presence there, with regular essays on how to approach, win, or even how much to care about the race. Now, attorney and Space Law & Policy Solutions founder Michael J. Listner wrote a new article on the "increasingly likely" scenario of China getting there first and enjoying the spoils: first dibs on land and an opportunity to set global norms.

"Anticipating this development, the U.S. can begin to shape the political narrative to mitigate any cultural, legal or political narratives China weaves to justify asserting sovereignty leading up to and after placing humans on the moon through three key steps," Listner wrote.

Those steps are:

Highlight the 57^th anniversary of Apollo 11 with a Congressional resolution.
Sponsor a UN resolution to reaffirm the non-sovereignty principle.
Directly engage China in closed-door meetings.

"Ultimately, soft power maneuvering alone will not prevent China from making sovereign claims on the moon and its resources," Listner wrote. "Nevertheless, preemptive soft power maneuvering can provide a layer of protection and legitimacy of the principle in the sphere of great power competition."

Read the full article here.

The next space race will be won at night

Of course, there are still steps that the United States can take to claim and maintain leadership on the moon. Take this article by Alan Campbell (director of growth and capture for space systems at Draper), A.C. Charania (senior vice president of space business development at Zeno Power), Tim Crain (co-founder and chief growth officer of Intuitive Machines) and Elizabeth Kryst (CEO of ispace-U.S.), where they argue that the U.S. must pursue nuclear power for lunar missions "as soon as possible."

And while they celebrate NASA's recent Fission Surface Power program to launch a fission reactor to the nuclear south pole by 2030, the authors argue that the U.S. can't afford to wait until 2030 given China's strides (and past successes) in long-term lunar operations.

"Nuclear batteries will enable new kinds of missions as we expand exploration not only across the moon but in the rest of the solar system — powering operations in multiple lunar locations, establishing distributed science networks and supporting our ambitions for Mars," they wrote. "For example, U.S. efforts to utilize lunar resources, such as water, metals and helium-3 will require power and long duration operations, making night survival essential. NASA's various mission directorates for exploration, science and technology will all directly benefit from this capability."

See the rest of the article here.

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean extracts the fuel element of a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) from storage on the lunar module on the Moon. Credit: NASA

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean extracts the fuel element of a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator from storage on the lunar module on the Moon. Credit: NASA

Europe must build its own critical infrastructure

Earlier this week, an Amazon Web Services outage caused widespread disruption, showcasing just how much online infrastructure depends on the cloud computing provider. And that disruption is a stark wakeup call, according to Victoria Pearson, co-founder and managing director of the communications consultancy, Sonder London. She wrote that Europe and the United Kingdom would be wise to bolster their security and develop their own online infrastructure.

"Relying on a handful of foreign technology providers is a strategic risk, not merely a commercial one; and incidents like the Amazon Web Services outage serve to signal to hostile actors how dependent we have become," Pearson wrote. "Resilience will come down to infrastructure, and who owns, builds and secures it. Europe can't afford to discover too late in the day that the foundations of its digital economy lie elsewhere and out of its control."

See the rest of the article here.

SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors.

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