CHAD WOLF: Space isn’t just the final frontier, it’s the ‘ultimate high ground’
The race to the moon is on — again. But the strategic competition playing out today is much bigger than our race with the Soviet Union in 1969. If China reaches the moon ahead of the United States and establishes a permanent, manned presence — it will not treat the lunar surface as a peaceful scientific outpost, but as an extension of its campaign to surpass America, intimidate our allies and compromise our systems that keep the American homeland secure. This is no longer something of science fiction.
President Donald Trump understands this threat, signing the Executive Order on Ensuring American Space Superiority, which made it abundantly clear that he wants the United States to lead this new space race — returning Americans back to the moon by 2028 and building a permanent manned presence on the lunar surface.
Let me be clear, the fear that China could somehow "claim" the moon by arriving first misunderstands both geography and international reality. Two of the main locations for settlement are the Shackleton Crater, which stretches about the distance from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland, and the South Pole–Aitken Basin, which is roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colo. The moon is vast.
The strategic concern and question for Congress is not who arrives "next," but who establishes a durable, scalable and defensible presence on the lunar surface. China understands this question and is well on their way to develop a reusable launch system to control this terrain and its abundant critical resources within a decade. The U.S. needs to recognize this threat and address it with the urgency it demands.
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The Obama-Biden administration’s Space Launch System (SLS), which is currently being used for the Artemis missions, utilizes 1980s architecture developed from the shuttle missions and has been highly criticized by NASA’s former inspector general during the Biden administration who calculated the cost of a single SLS launch was $4.2 billion, with nearly $64 billion already spent despite only one operational flight since 2022. This is an enormous price tag with limited payload capacity and a launch cadence measured in years rather than months.
Seeing NASA’s struggles with the SLS, Chinese state-backed firms are now mimicking architectures that support fully reusable, self-landing heavy-lift rockets modeled on SpaceX’s Starship. As seen on Feb. 11, China’s Long March 10 booster (developed in just eight years) successfully guided itself to a powered, vertical ocean splashdown. This is an unmistakable signal that China is quickly catching up to us and recognizes that a nation that can launch more often and move more mass will dominate.
The critical national security question is this: What happens if the U.S. does not pivot quickly toward prioritizing cost, capacity and cadence, after Artemis III?
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First, we will likely see the formation of a permanent Chinese, manned presence expanding Beijing’s intelligence collection and space awareness across the Earth–moon system helping China monitor U.S. and allied activity. Beijing has invested in capabilities designed to "degrade, damage, or destroy" U.S. satellites — the backbone of American command-and-control and targeting. This has direct homeland security implications.
Trump is right to push a layered, space-enabled missile defense, known as the "Golden Dome," but if the Chinese control the ultimate high ground, it can build a moon-based counter-command designed to blind, spoof, disrupt or hold at risk the space layer that makes that shield possible. Put simply: you cannot defend the homeland from above if Beijing can contest the space above you. The United States should establish that capability first — call it the "Donald J. Trump Moon Base" and lock in the operational advantage ahead of the Chinese.
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Second, if China is left untouched on the lunar surface, it would surely increase the risk of espionage, sabotage and gray-zone interference against our own forthcoming lunar infrastructure.
Finally, Beijing will seek to turn its presence into control over resources on the lunar surface. It is critical for us to get ahead of the Chinese on the extraction of these critical minerals, which China already has a stronghold of on Earth. We need these critical minerals for national defense, economic prosperity, and, frankly, our sovereignty.
The moon is the ultimate high ground; we cannot afford to be first on Earth but second in space. If China gets to the moon, fine, but if it frequently returns, they will turn their presence into control — over the "Golden Dome," over our critical infrastructure on Earth and in low Earth orbit, and over the resources the moon provides — America will be permanently exposed to its greatest adversary.
To beat China, Congress should demand accountability for delays and cost overruns, stop blindly giving subsidies to outdated systems, and pivot to reusability. Our continued homeland security depends on it. Let’s put America first and prioritize cost, capacity and cadence.