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That's awesome. Secretly (?) I'm hoping for another "space race"— this time between the U.S. and China. I'm hoping this for the U.S.'s sake. I'm hoping that go

That's awesome. Secretly (?) I'm hoping for another "space race"— this time between the U.S. and China. I'm hoping this for the U.S.'s sake. I'm hoping that good can come of it.

spyspy 11mo ago
If you haven't been following space updates closely, the US is _already_ in a race with China, especially in regards to the Artemis (moon) missions. That being said it's mostly being used as an excuse to keep SLS alive and prop up the legacy space contractors... It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior...
- mschuster91 11mo ago
  What use is the stuff that went on 60 years in the past when most people involved with it are dead and a lot of the knowledge has been lost in the meantime?
  - delusional 11mo ago
    I don't necessarily think the knowledge is lost, but the second system effect sure is in full swing.
    - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      It isn’t lost. But it’s decaying. I remember picking through an aerospace scrapyard in North Hollywood a decade ago with extremely-talented launch engineers (and entrepreneurs). The aim was to look at parts, measure them and figure out why they were built like they were. We looked, a little, at stuff like nozzles. But mostly we focussed on bolts, joiners, turbine blades and the like.
      - Koala_ice 11mo ago
        That sounds like living amongst the ruins of the Roman Empire
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > sounds like living amongst the ruins of the Roman Empire Down to the fact that the Eastern Roman Empire was going strong. Even in 2014, when I was in North Hollywood, SpaceX was carrying the torch.
- MichaelNolan 11mo ago
  > It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior... If you pick a random person off the street and ask them who discovered the Americas will they answer 1. Leif Erikson, 2. Indigenous peoples or 3. Christopher Columbus? If you ask people who invented the smartphone will they say Apple or some other company? It’s absolutely possible to lose a race you had previously won.
  - xnorswap 11mo ago
    Or indeed, ask them who won the space race, because by most measures, that was the Soviets too. Soviets achieved: - First artificial Orbit ( Sputnik ) - First animal to orbit ( Laika ) - First Man to orbit ( Yuri Gagarin ) - First Woman to orbit (Valentina Tereshkova ) - First EVA ( Alexei Leonov ) - First moon landing ( Luna 9 ) - First landing on another planet ( Venera 8 ) Many of these years before the USA achieved the equivalent. The first female US astronaut wasn't until the mid 1980's. The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing. Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
    - stackedinserter 11mo ago
      They are still jerking on these 50+ years old achievements, without having new ones. "Space race" didn't stop after Venera landing, and soviets/russians are thing of the past now. Aside of useless ISS trips, they have no relevance in space anymore. > "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense. "Won the space race" because they were first at the very beginning is a nonsense too. Following this logic, China won rocket race because they invented first rockets centuries ago.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space :) In 2025, 12 countries (so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#By_country Seems like every month there is ~30 launches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...), November has mostly US and China, but also have (or will have) India, Turkey, Japan, Russia and Italy as countries with launches. Pretty great to see that more nations are getting involved. Randomly, I stumbled upon the Shijian series of satellites, apparently featuring an arm that could tow other satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space But only two investing in high-cadence, high-mass capabilities.
foobarian 11mo ago
I can't help but wonder about why countries are doing this. Launch detection? Cameras? Other secret use? Making money for commercial sats? (Starlink, maybe GPS-equivalent, other?)
- perihelions 11mo ago
  Satellite constellations (links in the final paragraph of the OP article).
  - SilverElfin 11mo ago
    I hope they become better at injecting payloads into low orbit. The higher orbits Chinese companies use for internet constellations right now have huge risks of space debris, since satellites will take hundreds of years to fall out of orbit.
    - perihelions 11mo ago
      It's true they're using much higher LEO orbits—not sure why you were downvoted for this basic and relevant fact. While Starlink goes to 500-600 km altitudes, Qianfan seems to target 800 km[a], and Guowang has been launching to 900 km and 1,145 km [b,c]. (I'm not discussing the few Starlinks in VLEO orbits below 300 km, because I don't know what the concrete plans are with those). Those are orbits with 100+ year dynamic lifetimes (as is regularly discussed, i.e. ref [d]). It's true that they could actively deorbit them; that's the lifespan of passive debris that fails to actively deorbit. (Ref [d] also discusses spent rocket stages in this context, and China's uniquely bad behavior there). I assume the main motive behind this is basic business economics. China doesn't have reusable boosters; the ones that might succeed this month won't reach Falcon 9 levels of mass production, and launch cadence, for several years. They're on an expensive on-ramp. To a first-order simplification 1,100 km orbits need only 1/4th as many satellites for the same coverage as 550 km orbits. [a] https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-megaconstellation https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-... [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang [c] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/china-may-have-taken-an-early-lead-in-the-race-for-a-military-megaconstellation/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/china-may-have-taken-a... [d] https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-could-litter-orbit-for-more-than-a-century-analysts-warn/ https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-coul...
bpodgursky 11mo ago
Would the US even fight? We've lost the shipbuilding race, auto race, drone race, without anyone in DC actually noticing. Most Americans don't even realize China has a manned space station. If China had a presence on the moon, would that wake up congress, or would they just put out a few tweets and go back to cultural dramatics?
- estimator7292 11mo ago
  Honestly I doubt it. Current government doesn't really have the ability to get their shit together and compete with anyone in any capacity. As much as usgov would love another reason to clutch pearls and shriek about China, we simply don't have the industry or resources to compete without a federal investment so massive that we wouldn't have any tax money left to give to the already ludicrously wealthy. And we can't have that. But really american industry has been so thoroughly gutted that we can't compete anymore. Everyone else builds everything better and cheaper than we can. If there's a new space race to be had, we've already lost.
  - bpodgursky 11mo ago
    I actually think the US industry is perfectly capable of competing in the space race if given regulatory streamlining, long-term consistent goals, and relatively modest funding by congress. But none of those are going to happen. I mean SpaceX was delayed to do an environmental impact statement to check whether their rockets would land on whales in the gulf of mexico. Nobody's serious.
    - Alive-in-2025 11mo ago
      Potentially destroying a significant amount of higher level mammals in the ocean is a real issue. Spacex managed to built their launch facility right on top of a formerly protected area I think they'll be fine
    - jltsiren 11mo ago
      Free countries do not have long-term consistent goals, almost by definition. They have elections instead, in which citizens indirectly determine the national goals and priorities for the next few years.
threethirtytwo 11mo ago
[dead]
nitwit005 11mo ago
The practical part of space flight is launching satellites, and weapons. Both countries are already doing both. If we're discussing manned missions to the moon or Mars, as an American I'd prefer China spent all the money and the US didn't bother. It'd be cool to see it happen, but no one can identify practical benefits, aside from a political win.
- Alive-in-2025 11mo ago
  You are missing that the money and research into figuring out how to solve many engineering and scientific challenges related to the missions had tremendous benefit to industry later. As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important
  - nickff 11mo ago
    It's not clear that concentrating so much money on a single government project fosters more benefit than having the money go to a variety of other projects. It is easy to see the items developed by something like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program, but we often miss the innovations created by private industry when you compare a similar total spend (Bastiat's "seen and unseen"). One example of the alternative is how (private) demand for cellular telephony has triggered many innovations, from powerful and efficient microcontrollers to bright LCD screens, and fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.
  - bell-cot 11mo ago
    I'm thinking that Apollo covered 90% of the useful spin-offs from developing tech for manned travel to the moon or Mars. And at least 90% of what's left was either covered by the ISS, or could be covered by a few small LEO space stations. The economic cases for manned moon or Mars programs look really iffy these days. The US has poured tens of $billions down the SLS rat hole, with very little to show for it. And Wienersmith's A City on Mars is a pretty damning dissection of the whole concept of Martian colonies.
    - zizee 11mo ago
SilverElfin 11mo ago
It feels like China hit an inflection point where they can rapidly progress, catch up, and perhaps surpass the US technologically. The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry. I think this is still a negative for the US though. China’s competitiveness means the Dollar and the US economy aren’t going to be dominant for long, or at least they’ll need to share their position with China. And US influence on the world order has been destroyed in the last year. If all of this continues - China’s progress, the slow erosion of American dominance, etc - then I think America will have to confront serious problems, like how it will deal with debt.
- dlisboa 11mo ago
  > The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry. Did it? We're talking 1949 up to a few years ago. 70 odd years from mass starvation to having their own space station. One could even say it's less than that, starting with the reforms in the 80s.
  - syntaxing 11mo ago
    Yup, people forget how fast China has grown in less than 30 years. This viral photo is 26 years apart. Meanwhile, there’s trains older than that in the NYC metro fleet [1]. [1] https://petapixel.com/2025/09/26/incredible-photos-show-the-same-chinese-train-driver-26-years-apart/ https://petapixel.com/2025/09/26/incredible-photos-show-the-...
- krona 11mo ago
  It's hard to see how China can sustain itself economically when the population is predicted to half by the end of the century and 30% the population will be >65 years old by 2050. Hard choices lie ahead.
  - ckocagil 11mo ago
    Isn't the US stock market betting on AGI and superintelligence in the next decade? Maybe a lower population won't be as big of an issue, or even an advantage.
jayd16 11mo ago
Who pays for it? It would be pretty funny to try to borrow from China... So even if its just a jobs program with a neat outcome, we'd have to deal with tax reform first, I'd imagine.
- _DeadFred_ 11mo ago
  You know the Chinese government is more in debt than the United States, right? It's structured differently, but that doesn't change much. Or is worse, because you can end up with the government backing/cosigning for government joint ventures in the same industries all over the nation (for example EVs).
  - jayd16 11mo ago
    If true, then the question of "who pays for this race" is even stronger, no?
MomsAVoxell 11mo ago
All it would take to revolutionise things is for SpaceX to open source all their engineering designs, and let the Germans and the Chinese build the things.
mcculley 11mo ago
There is a market for this on Kalshi and China is narrowly in the lead again, according to traders. https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoonman/manned-mission-to-the-moon/kxmoonman-31 https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoonman/manned-mission-to-the-m...
slimebot80 11mo ago
There is a race to the moon happening right now https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/spacex-us-moon-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/spacex-us-moo... You don't hear about it much, for some reason.

That's awesome. Secretly (?) I'm hoping for another "space race"— this time between the U.S. and China. I'm hoping this for the U.S.'s sake. I'm hoping that good can come of it.

spyspy 11mo ago

If you haven't been following space updates closely, the US is _already_ in a race with China, especially in regards to the Artemis (moon) missions. That being said it's mostly being used as an excuse to keep SLS alive and prop up the legacy space contractors... It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior...

mschuster91 11mo ago
What use is the stuff that went on 60 years in the past when most people involved with it are dead and a lot of the knowledge has been lost in the meantime?
- delusional 11mo ago
  I don't necessarily think the knowledge is lost, but the second system effect sure is in full swing.
  - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    It isn’t lost. But it’s decaying. I remember picking through an aerospace scrapyard in North Hollywood a decade ago with extremely-talented launch engineers (and entrepreneurs). The aim was to look at parts, measure them and figure out why they were built like they were. We looked, a little, at stuff like nozzles. But mostly we focussed on bolts, joiners, turbine blades and the like.
    - Koala_ice 11mo ago
      That sounds like living amongst the ruins of the Roman Empire
      - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > sounds like living amongst the ruins of the Roman Empire Down to the fact that the Eastern Roman Empire was going strong. Even in 2014, when I was in North Hollywood, SpaceX was carrying the torch.
MichaelNolan 11mo ago
> It's hard to lose a contest you won 60 years prior... If you pick a random person off the street and ask them who discovered the Americas will they answer 1. Leif Erikson, 2. Indigenous peoples or 3. Christopher Columbus? If you ask people who invented the smartphone will they say Apple or some other company? It’s absolutely possible to lose a race you had previously won.
- xnorswap 11mo ago
  Or indeed, ask them who won the space race, because by most measures, that was the Soviets too. Soviets achieved: - First artificial Orbit ( Sputnik ) - First animal to orbit ( Laika ) - First Man to orbit ( Yuri Gagarin ) - First Woman to orbit (Valentina Tereshkova ) - First EVA ( Alexei Leonov ) - First moon landing ( Luna 9 ) - First landing on another planet ( Venera 8 ) Many of these years before the USA achieved the equivalent. The first female US astronaut wasn't until the mid 1980's. The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing. Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
  - stackedinserter 11mo ago
    They are still jerking on these 50+ years old achievements, without having new ones. "Space race" didn't stop after Venera landing, and soviets/russians are thing of the past now. Aside of useless ISS trips, they have no relevance in space anymore. > "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense. "Won the space race" because they were first at the very beginning is a nonsense too. Following this logic, China won rocket race because they invented first rockets centuries ago.

embedding-shape 11mo ago

Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space :) In 2025, 12 countries (so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#By_country Seems like every month there is ~30 launches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...), November has mostly US and China, but also have (or will have) India, Turkey, Japan, Russia and Italy as countries with launches. Pretty great to see that more nations are getting involved. Randomly, I stumbled upon the Shijian series of satellites, apparently featuring an arm that could tow other satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space But only two investing in high-cadence, high-mass capabilities.

foobarian 11mo ago

I can't help but wonder about why countries are doing this. Launch detection? Cameras? Other secret use? Making money for commercial sats? (Starlink, maybe GPS-equivalent, other?)

perihelions 11mo ago
Satellite constellations (links in the final paragraph of the OP article).
- SilverElfin 11mo ago
  I hope they become better at injecting payloads into low orbit. The higher orbits Chinese companies use for internet constellations right now have huge risks of space debris, since satellites will take hundreds of years to fall out of orbit.
  - perihelions 11mo ago
    It's true they're using much higher LEO orbits—not sure why you were downvoted for this basic and relevant fact. While Starlink goes to 500-600 km altitudes, Qianfan seems to target 800 km[a], and Guowang has been launching to 900 km and 1,145 km [b,c]. (I'm not discussing the few Starlinks in VLEO orbits below 300 km, because I don't know what the concrete plans are with those). Those are orbits with 100+ year dynamic lifetimes (as is regularly discussed, i.e. ref [d]). It's true that they could actively deorbit them; that's the lifespan of passive debris that fails to actively deorbit. (Ref [d] also discusses spent rocket stages in this context, and China's uniquely bad behavior there). I assume the main motive behind this is basic business economics. China doesn't have reusable boosters; the ones that might succeed this month won't reach Falcon 9 levels of mass production, and launch cadence, for several years. They're on an expensive on-ramp. To a first-order simplification 1,100 km orbits need only 1/4th as many satellites for the same coverage as 550 km orbits. [a] https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-megaconstellation https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-... [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang [c] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/china-may-have-taken-an-early-lead-in-the-race-for-a-military-megaconstellation/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/china-may-have-taken-a... [d] https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-could-litter-orbit-for-more-than-a-century-analysts-warn/ https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-coul...

bpodgursky 11mo ago

Would the US even fight? We've lost the shipbuilding race, auto race, drone race, without anyone in DC actually noticing. Most Americans don't even realize China has a manned space station. If China had a presence on the moon, would that wake up congress, or would they just put out a few tweets and go back to cultural dramatics?

estimator7292 11mo ago
Honestly I doubt it. Current government doesn't really have the ability to get their shit together and compete with anyone in any capacity. As much as usgov would love another reason to clutch pearls and shriek about China, we simply don't have the industry or resources to compete without a federal investment so massive that we wouldn't have any tax money left to give to the already ludicrously wealthy. And we can't have that. But really american industry has been so thoroughly gutted that we can't compete anymore. Everyone else builds everything better and cheaper than we can. If there's a new space race to be had, we've already lost.
- bpodgursky 11mo ago
  I actually think the US industry is perfectly capable of competing in the space race if given regulatory streamlining, long-term consistent goals, and relatively modest funding by congress. But none of those are going to happen. I mean SpaceX was delayed to do an environmental impact statement to check whether their rockets would land on whales in the gulf of mexico. Nobody's serious.
  - Alive-in-2025 11mo ago
    Potentially destroying a significant amount of higher level mammals in the ocean is a real issue. Spacex managed to built their launch facility right on top of a formerly protected area I think they'll be fine
  - jltsiren 11mo ago
    Free countries do not have long-term consistent goals, almost by definition. They have elections instead, in which citizens indirectly determine the national goals and priorities for the next few years.

threethirtytwo 11mo ago

[dead]

nitwit005 11mo ago

The practical part of space flight is launching satellites, and weapons. Both countries are already doing both. If we're discussing manned missions to the moon or Mars, as an American I'd prefer China spent all the money and the US didn't bother. It'd be cool to see it happen, but no one can identify practical benefits, aside from a political win.

Alive-in-2025 11mo ago
You are missing that the money and research into figuring out how to solve many engineering and scientific challenges related to the missions had tremendous benefit to industry later. As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important
- nickff 11mo ago
  It's not clear that concentrating so much money on a single government project fosters more benefit than having the money go to a variety of other projects. It is easy to see the items developed by something like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program, but we often miss the innovations created by private industry when you compare a similar total spend (Bastiat's "seen and unseen"). One example of the alternative is how (private) demand for cellular telephony has triggered many innovations, from powerful and efficient microcontrollers to bright LCD screens, and fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.
- bell-cot 11mo ago
  I'm thinking that Apollo covered 90% of the useful spin-offs from developing tech for manned travel to the moon or Mars. And at least 90% of what's left was either covered by the ISS, or could be covered by a few small LEO space stations. The economic cases for manned moon or Mars programs look really iffy these days. The US has poured tens of $billions down the SLS rat hole, with very little to show for it. And Wienersmith's A City on Mars is a pretty damning dissection of the whole concept of Martian colonies.
  - zizee 11mo ago

SilverElfin 11mo ago

It feels like China hit an inflection point where they can rapidly progress, catch up, and perhaps surpass the US technologically. The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry. I think this is still a negative for the US though. China’s competitiveness means the Dollar and the US economy aren’t going to be dominant for long, or at least they’ll need to share their position with China. And US influence on the world order has been destroyed in the last year. If all of this continues - China’s progress, the slow erosion of American dominance, etc - then I think America will have to confront serious problems, like how it will deal with debt.

dlisboa 11mo ago
> The road out of “developing country” took forever but now I see them producing great products in basically every industry. Did it? We're talking 1949 up to a few years ago. 70 odd years from mass starvation to having their own space station. One could even say it's less than that, starting with the reforms in the 80s.
- syntaxing 11mo ago
  Yup, people forget how fast China has grown in less than 30 years. This viral photo is 26 years apart. Meanwhile, there’s trains older than that in the NYC metro fleet [1]. [1] https://petapixel.com/2025/09/26/incredible-photos-show-the-same-chinese-train-driver-26-years-apart/ https://petapixel.com/2025/09/26/incredible-photos-show-the-...
krona 11mo ago
It's hard to see how China can sustain itself economically when the population is predicted to half by the end of the century and 30% the population will be >65 years old by 2050. Hard choices lie ahead.
- ckocagil 11mo ago
  Isn't the US stock market betting on AGI and superintelligence in the next decade? Maybe a lower population won't be as big of an issue, or even an advantage.

jayd16 11mo ago

Who pays for it? It would be pretty funny to try to borrow from China... So even if its just a jobs program with a neat outcome, we'd have to deal with tax reform first, I'd imagine.

_DeadFred_ 11mo ago
You know the Chinese government is more in debt than the United States, right? It's structured differently, but that doesn't change much. Or is worse, because you can end up with the government backing/cosigning for government joint ventures in the same industries all over the nation (for example EVs).
- jayd16 11mo ago
  If true, then the question of "who pays for this race" is even stronger, no?

MomsAVoxell 11mo ago

All it would take to revolutionise things is for SpaceX to open source all their engineering designs, and let the Germans and the Chinese build the things.

mcculley 11mo ago

There is a market for this on Kalshi and China is narrowly in the lead again, according to traders. https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoonman/manned-mission-to-the-moon/kxmoonman-31 https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoonman/manned-mission-to-the-m...

slimebot80 11mo ago

There is a race to the moon happening right now https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/spacex-us-moon-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/spacex-us-moo... You don't hear about it much, for some reason.