The U.S. could lose the space race to China
The Artemis II mission was impressive, but America trails by many measures, according to analysts.
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Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The View from Space.
🇨🇳 In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Buono argued that ‘Artemis II masked an uneasy truth: Washington is trailing Beijing’:
‘By many measures, Artemis II was a triumph. The mission demonstrated the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems and its powerful Space Launch System rocket. It enabled the first manned deep-space optical communications test. The images it beamed back to Earth were breathtaking.
Yet these achievements hid serious problems. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had intended to launch Artemis II in 2023. Then technical issues repeatedly postponed the mission: hydrogen leaks, failures in helium flow, unexpected erosion of the heat shield. Beset by delays and pivot fatigue, NASA has downgraded its next Artemis flight from a manned lunar landing to an Earth-orbit docking test in 2027. It now seems that U.S. astronauts won’t walk on the moon until 2028 at the earliest.
Meanwhile, China grinds away. In February its space agency conducted a successful in-flight abort test from Hainan. Early in the ascent, mission controllers deliberately triggered an escape system that pulled an unmanned Mengzhou capsule away from the rocket. The capsule parachuted safely to sea while the rocket continued its flight. After re-entry the booster reignited its engines and performed a controlled, propulsive splashdown. NASA’s moon rocket can’t do that.’
🛡️ In Military Embedded Systems, FibreCoat’s Robert Brüll and Jean-François Morizur of Cailabs made the case for much greater space resilience:
‘The industry should also make parts tougher, and we should be quicker about it. Space exposes electronics to constant radiation and electromagnetic interference, as both can disrupt signals or damage parts. We know how to reduce that risk. Engineers can use shielding, conductive coatings, and composite materials; select radiation-tolerant components; and design circuits that keep working when one element fails. …
Also needed: backup communication paths. Most satellite links still rely on radio frequencies, and their signals can be jammed or intercepted with the right equipment. Optical links provide an alternative. Laser communication between ground stations and satellites, or between satellites themselves, uses narrow beams that are harder to detect and disrupt. They also carry more data at higher speeds. If interference affects one channel, traffic can shift to another channel and service can continue. This is not duplication for its own sake – it is a thoroughly practical way to reduce vulnerability and maintain continuity under pressure.’
🪐 The Financial Times reported that a new ‘golden age’ of space exploration has arrived:
‘The European Space Agency’s Plato satellite is due to launch early next year, armed with an array of 26 high-specification cameras. They will scan the thousands of so-called exoplanets — worlds beyond our solar system.
The programme is a sign of how rapidly knowledge of the cosmos is advancing. The first planet orbiting another star was discovered only in 1992. Plato is part of a historic effort to identify distant Earthlike worlds that hold lessons for our planet’s future and may even be capable of hosting life.
“The main goal is to understand to what extent our solar system is different from other systems or not,” says Ana Heras Pastor, project scientist for the Plato mission.
Plato is part of what Reid Wiseman, commander of Nasa’s Artemis II mission, has hailed as a “golden age” of space travel. Last month the Artemis crew rounded the far side of the Moon, just as their predecessors in the Apollo programme did more than half a century ago in a previous era of extraterrestrial ambition.’
🌟 In the Wall Street Journal, Louise Perry wrote about how astronauts often experience profound spiritual and psychological disorientation:
‘There is something both transcendent and disturbing about this sight, an effect that apparently can’t be replicated through photographs. It leaves a person with a sense of oneness with all of humanity, and a profound sense of connection with the rest of the universe, or what Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell described as an “ecstasy of unity.” Many astronauts come to understand the experience in Christian terms.
That may have been what Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman was describing last week when he spoke to reporters of the “otherworldly” sensation of viewing Earth from space:
“I’m not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything. So I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come visit us for a minute. And when that man walked in, I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I just I broke down in tears. It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through.”’
🌙 Michelle Buckner, a former NASA Information System Security Officer, argued in SpaceNews that Artemis 2 was ‘the easy part’, and that the question is whether ‘America’s industrial base can keep pace with what comes next'‘:
‘Artemis 3 is not simply the next flight. It is a financial and technical inflection point.
The aha moment is this: Artemis 2 proved the United States can send astronauts around the moon again. Artemis 3 has to prove the U.S. can do something much harder: integrate a public-private lunar architecture at scale, sustain the contractor base beneath it and land before the entire model buckles under cost, schedule, or supply-chain weakness.
Artemis 3 will demand more from the contractor base than any mission since Apollo, and it will demand it faster. The south pole landing will generate science, data and operational requirements that drive follow-on work across propulsion, life support, surface mobility, communications and in-situ resource utilization. That work flows to suppliers who are right now either preparing for the compliance environment ahead or falling behind it.’
🇪🇺 The EU stepped up its space security with congestion and interference rising, EurActiv reported:
‘From navigation and energy systems to disaster response and defence coordination, critical services across the European economy increasingly depend on space-based data. As that dependence deepens, so too does exposure to disruption – whether from space debris, malicious interference or the failure of terrestrial infrastructure during crises.
Recent analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) highlights how protecting critical infrastructure – both physical and digital – is becoming central to Europe’s resilience strategy, with space systems increasingly part of that equation.
Against this backdrop, the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) is advancing a layered approach to space security, structured around three pillars: protecting assets, securing signals and ensuring resilient services.’
🚀 At the third annual London Space Finance conference, hosted by Mark Wheatley’s DWC, investors, policymakers, and industry leaders came together to discuss how to make space more investable. Capgemini’s Lucy Mason reflected:
Very much enjoyed speaking on the Commercial Space panel at London Space Finance yesterday, an excellent event with a fantastic audience … My takeaways:
1. Commercial space and defence space are indivisible: defence relies on commercial space, and commercial space form part of our wider defence ecosystem (whether we want it to or not, there are dependencies which can be weaponised)
2. Focusing on dual use technologies is a good investment strategy - cybersecurity and crypto, AI, autonomy, robotics, advanced materials, sensors and photonics are fundamental technologies underpinning the future of many sectors
3. Much talk about risk - commercial, legal, insurance, financial - and managing risks at the cutting edge of technologies where things are uncertain: better data and testing will help, but we need the right mechanisms and understanding to move forward - ultimately that is about good communications, which is where events like this are so useful!
🧱 Finally, a Lego version of the ‘Project Hail Mary’ spaceship soared 114,790 feet into the stratosphere: