Cruz brought little surprise to Isaacman’s confirmation hearing last April. This was a poster of the moon. On one side stood three astronauts and a huge Chinese flag. The space suit, on the other hand, contained two more figures, the smallest of which were stars and stripes planted in the lunar soil. Cruz apologized for the imbalance. “My team used ChatGPT,” said the senator, who chairs the committee that oversees NASA.
Cruz then asked Isaacman, a little more seriously, “Do we have your commitment that you will not let a scenario like the one on the right of this poster happen? That China will not beat us to the moon?”
Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who had paid for his own missions to space, replied, “Senator, I only see the left side of that poster.”
It was a red-meat, fuck-yes, pitch-perfect response. And that’s what Isaacman must have meant. But by the time of his testimony, the Trump administration had begun a process that would devastate NASA, forcing nearly 4,000 of the agency’s employees to leave their jobs. The White House then proposed a massive 24 percent cut in NASA’s budget. Trump then rescinded Isaacman’s nomination and named a new part-time acting chief, a man who claimed in his official NASA biography to be one half of “America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple.” Then the man got into a fight with Elon Musk, who is building NASA’s moon lander. And Isaacman was back in the running. In December, Trump concluded the year with an executive order mandating Americans return to the Moon by 2028.
If all this doesn’t suit you, welcome to the club, Space Ranger. This dysfunction is one of the many reasons why most of the two dozen sources I interviewed for this story believe China will be the first to send people to the moon. I spoke to nine former NASA officials who served at the highest levels of the space agency under Presidents Trump and Biden; None of them were optimistic about America’s prospects. “We did the worst thing in the world,” one of the nine told me. “We set it up as a race without a plan to win.”
The original space program was the ultimate symbol of America at its peak. rocket scientist That was shorthand for genius, and many of them were working in Huntsville, Alabama, aka Rocket City. Word Astronaut was synonymous with grit, and you could find the bravest of them in Houston. moon Was (and is) code for something borderline impossible. The space race has helped fuel the development of everything from integrated circuits to solar panels to 5G. But that was before America decided to stab him in the brain.
Today, most of the world drives Chinese electric cars, powers their homes with Chinese solar panels, and keeps in touch with phones made in China. Chinese scientists have outpaced their American counterparts in the production of high-quality research, and the White House has responded by gutting U.S. science funding and charging $100,000 to admit highly skilled immigrants. So if Chinese astronauts do touch down from their lander and livestream the results in 4K — and frankly, at this point it’s still “if” — it would be much more than a point of national pride for Beijing. It would be a declaration that the American century is officially over.
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