Another race is on for America to beat Communist China, and this time it’s to be the first to walk on the dark side of the moon. 

China is about to take one giant leap in that direction if the nation successfully gathers samples from the part of the moon that humans have never seen during its Chang’e 6 mission, which launched last Friday. Footage released Wednesday shows that the unmanned spacecraft has entered lunar orbit and is expected to touch down on the surface in early June. It would be a major victory for Beijing’s decades-long spaceflight strategy, which seeks to land a person on the moon by 2030 and establish a permanent base there by 2036.

NASA plans to celebrate a south pole moonwalk by 2026, a $93 billion plan called Artemis III, with the help of private contractors like SpaceX. America is still the only country to have successfully landed humans on the lunar surface, yet it has only gathered samples from the near side. 

As America enters what many foreign policy thinkers call a Cold War 2.0 with China, it’s unclear if it can dominate space like when it outshined the Soviet Union in 1969. 

“China is competing with everyone in space and just wants to prove that it’s a force to be reckoned with and that no one can stop China,” the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Clayton Swope, tells the Sun. Beijing’s goal, he says, is to cement its prestige as a global superpower by launching man into the outer heavens. 

In 2019, China achieved the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon, which permanently faces away from Earth, with its Chang’e 4 flight. If China can next put satellites there, it can expand its communications with the near side of the moon and its ability to collect intelligence on what’s happening below.

That poses “major military implications for the U.S.,” a professor of space policy at Arizona State University, Namrata Goswami, who co-authored the 2020 book “Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space,” tells the Sun.

“The problem is that the U.S. space force doesn’t have such capability in cislunar space yet,” Ms. Goswami says, referring to the region of outer space between the Earth and the moon. “There is the danger that we might lose the strategic high ground to China.”

It’s not just China. Unlike the bipolar competition of the original Cold War, the race to set up a human presence on the moon involves multiple world powers. Russia plans to deploy a lunar base between 2031 and 2040. India, after landing on the moon in 2023, announced its plans to put an astronaut on the moon by 2040. Japan, the fifth nation to make a soft landing on the moon, in January, set its goal for 2028.  

The race is also a contest to capture critical lunar energy resources, including helium, which could help crack the code to nuclear fusion, and water, which can serve as rocket fuel to launch satellites from the moon. Other rare minerals NASA estimates are on the moon include platinum, titanium, iron, and silicon, which can be used for manufacturing in space. 

“They say that the world’s first trillionaire will be the person who figures out how to mine the moon for minerals,” the author of a 2023 book, “China Is Going To War,” Gordon Chang, tells the Sun. “China is determined to get there. And we’re not. We’re just not that serious.” For Beijing, the strategy expands beyond a lunar landing, he warns, for “the moon is a gateway to Mars.”

Meanwhile, the scheduled timeline for America’s first crewed missions to the moon in decades has been slowed down. NASA pushed a lunar flyby — Artemis II — to September 2025 and an attempted landing on the moon — Artemis III — to September 2026. The agency has pointed to issues discovered during flight tests with SpaceX’s new Starship vehicle, which powers the Artemis III. SpaceX did not immediately respond to the Sun’s requests for comment on the matter.

Lagging behind SpaceX is Boeing, whose Starliner program has faced years of delays and budget issues. On Friday, the company will launch its first crewed test flight to the International Space Station after the scheduled Monday night flight of its Starliner capsule was scrubbed due to an issue with the spacecraft’s rocket. It aims to get NASA authorization to be able to routinely fly to the ISS. Outdated regulations are threatening to further delay progress.

“The biggest thing we can do is help get out of the way of private innovation,” a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on space policy, Todd Harrison, tells the Sun. Space X’s starship, for one, has run into licensing delays with the Federal Aviation Administration due to its shortage of employees, he says. “If we can fix that, then we won’t be holding back our industry. We need to unleash the full speed and strength of our commercial sector.”

Mr. Musk estimated in September that SpaceX will launch roughly 90 percent of the world’s total payload mass into orbit in 2024. Last year, the company launched four times as much as the rest of the world combined. The Starship vehicle, even with its issues, is the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, and it is fully reusable. China is stuck copying’s America’s successes and countering America’s advances using anti-satellite weapons, Mr. Harrison says, so it “will always be a generation behind.” 

“It’s a lopsided bipolar competition between the U.S. and China,” Mr. Harrison says. “The U.S. still enjoys a sizable advantage over China in space launch and in satellite technology and manufacturing.” America also has the advantage of partnering with 39 nations as part of the 2020 Artemis Accords, while China is working with Russia, Turkey, and other “B team partners,” as Mr. Harrison puts it. 

Fears have grown that China will ignore the provision of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which said no nation may lay claim to space. China ratified that treaty in 1983 yet was accused of violating it when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites, Fengyun-1C, with a missile that risked disrupting other spacecraft in orbit.   

Beijing’s attitude toward the moon mirrors its treatment, declared illegal by international courts, of resource-rich islands in the South China Sea. The key, Mr. Swope says, is for America, its peers, and companies operating in space to use the Artemis Accords to establish international norms for space as Chinese capabilities advance at what Lieutenant General Stephen Whiting of the United States Space Command calls “a breathtaking speed.”

“We have to think about how China behaves on Earth when it comes to international rules and resources,” Mr. Swope says. “We can co-exist and be neighbors in space, but at the same time create a level playing field for the U.S.”