The space race is increasingly looking like China’s to lose.
On Friday, NASA announced that it was dramatically shifting the goal posts for its upcoming Artemis III mission, which was originally intended to land humans on the Moon by 2027.
Now, under the revised program, there will be no crewed landing with Artemis III. Instead, the mission will serve as a test flight in low orbit around the Moon, with a crewed mission being pushed back to a new Artemis IV mission, slated for no earlier than December 2028.
The change is part of NASA’s incremental, “back to the basics” approach to development, following years of setbacks. But to many, it’s another sign that the US space program is now lagging behind China’s, despite many figures in the Trump administration talking up a space race with Beijing.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman alluded to that sense of competition in an announcement of the changes.
“With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays, and achieve our objectives,” he said.
The Artemis program has been beset by countless delays and technical challenges. The most recent came last month, when NASA was forced to scrub the launch of Artemis II, a mission to send astronauts in orbit around the Moon, twice in a row after leaks were discovered in the mission’s Space Launch System rocket. Problems with the SLS aren’t new: despite development beginning in 2011, the Boeing-built rocket has flown only once, in 2022. Another rocket involved in the program, SpaceX’s Starship, is still far from being ready for primetime, with many of its test flights ending in disastrous explosions.
Artemis’s woes, however, are just one tragedy among a veritable massacre slowly unfolding across NASA. The Trump administration has slammed the space agency with cuts, firing or forced out over 4,000 employees and closing entire buildings at some of its most iconic facilities, including NASA Goddard.
Some anonymous NASA employees have privately fretted to journalists about the agency’s dire state of affairs.
“We did the worst of all worlds,” one told Wired of the agency’s rudderless approach. “We positioned it as a race without planning to win.”
Taken together, the revamped timeline, plus the general chaos tearing up the agency inside out, does not instill confidence that NASA will be ready to deliver a Moon landing on its pushed-back 2028 date. It wouldn’t be the first time it set out an unrealistic timeline: in 2019, the Trump administration suddenly declared that NASA would have astronauts on the Moon by 2024 — something that everyone in the agency knew was “bullsh*t,” a former top official told Wired.
China, meanwhile, is charting a steady course, and was perhaps being modest when it said it planned to place Chinese astronauts on the Moon “before 2030.” Its lunar program has racked up impressive feat after impressive feat, including successfully returning a regolith sample collected from the far side of the Moon in 2024 using a robotic lander — something that had never been accomplished. A year later, it successfully tested its Lanyue lunar lander, while NASA is yet to finalize its choice of lunar lander, with SpaceX and Blue Origin both vying to make the cut.
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