Space Race 2.0: The US-China Battle for the Moon

For ten days in April, four astronauts circled the far side of the Moon in a spacecraft called Integrity. Eight weeks later, three more lifted off from the edge of the Gobi Desert under a different flag and a different ideology. Between them lies what may be the most consequential geopolitical contest of the 21st century, and it is no longer being fought entirely on Earth.

NASA's Artemis II mission launched on April 1 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center, carrying Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, on a ten-day loop around the Moon. They splashed down in the Pacific off San Diego on 10 April, having travelled 252,756 miles from Earth - the farthest any human has ever ventured. It was the first crewed flight beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

On May 24, China answered.

The Shenzhou-23 spacecraft launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center carrying commander Zhu Yangzhu, pilot Zhang Zhiyuan and payload specialist Lai Ka-ying, Hong Kong's first astronaut. Their immediate destination was the Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit, where one of them will undertake China's first year-long mission. The longer destination, however, is unambiguous: a Chinese boot on the lunar surface before 2030.

For New Zealand and the wider Indo-Pacific, what happens above us matters more than ever.

Two programmes, two visions

The temptation to frame Artemis as Apollo-redux - flags, footprints, glory - badly undersells what is at stake. As Australian space lawyer Cassandra Steer recently argued for the Lowy Institute, the contest is fundamentally about "dominating lunar real estate" at the Moon's south pole, where billions of tonnes of water ice sit in permanently shadowed craters. Water means oxygen, drinking supply and rocket propellant - the difference between visiting the Moon and living on it.

NASA's plan, as it now stands, is to attempt a south-pole landing in 2028 on Artemis IV, after a 2027 Earth-orbit test of the lunar lander. China is racing the same clock with a very different architecture. Its programme rests on the new Long March 10 rocket, the Mengzhou ("Dream Vessel") crew capsule and a separate uncrewed lunar lander — two launches that will rendezvous in lunar orbit before descent. Both elements passed key flight tests earlier this year, and the Chang'e-7 probe, due to launch later in 2026, will survey the south pole in advance of any human visit.

Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship on the night of May 24 to send three astronauts to its orbiting space station. Photo: CCTV/Facebook

Beijing has been disciplined and quietly relentless. Since 2019 it has landed a rover on the far side of the Moon, returned lunar samples, put a rover on Mars and finished its own space station. Its lunar timetable has not slipped. Washington's has.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman cancelled the Gateway lunar space station earlier this year, a station that was meant to anchor international cooperation with Europe and Canada. Trump-era budget cuts, staff losses across NASA and the administration's "America First" reframing of Artemis have unnerved partners who were promised a multilateral project. Canada has responded by deepening ties with the European Space Agency.

New Zealand on the launch pad

What is sometimes forgotten in the Washington–Beijing framing is that the very first official mission of the Artemis programme did not lift off from Florida. It lifted off from Māhia.

On 28 June 2022, Rocket Lab's Electron rocket launched NASA's CAPSTONE cubesat from Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula. The microwave-sized spacecraft, ferried into deep space by Rocket Lab's Lunar Photon upper stage, was designed to validate the near-rectilinear halo orbit intended for the Gateway lunar station and for crewed Orion missions. CAPSTONE made the Kiwi-built Electron the smallest rocket ever to send a payload toward the Moon, and Māhia the launch site for NASA's first Artemis-branded mission. New Zealand's Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and a University of Canterbury-led team also contributed to the project.

On June 28, 2022, Rocket Lab launched a CubeSat to the Moon - a pathfinding mission to support NASA’s Artemis programme. Photo: Screengrab from Rocket Lab's YT Channel

There is a quiet irony in the fact that Gateway, the very station CAPSTONE was scouting orbits for, has now been shelved. But Rocket Lab's lunar ambitions have only grown. The company has since flown spacecraft and components on more than 1,700 missions to the Moon, Mars and Venus, including the NASA-funded ESCAPADE Mars smallsats and a study contract for Mars Sample Return. In early 2026 it acquired Motiv Space Systems, the California firm that built the robotic arm on NASA's Perseverance Mars rover — explicitly to move into lunar and planetary surface missions. Its medium-lift Neutron rocket, designed to be human-rated, is due to debut later this year.

For a country of five million, this is unusual leverage. New Zealand is not merely a signatory to the lunar order; it is a supplier to it.

The Pacific stake

Wellington joined the Artemis Accords in May 2021, one of the original eleven countries, citing the responsibility of kaitiakitanga over the space environment. The Accords have since grown to 64 signatories, roughly a third of UN member states, and they are quietly reshaping how the world reads the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, particularly on commercial resource extraction. China has not signed. Nor has Russia, which has all but vanished from the lunar conversation since the invasion of Ukraine.

The Pacific is also where the two programmes meet politically. China's International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) has been steadily recruiting partners across our region. Shenzhou-24, due later this year, will carry a Pakistani astronaut to Tiangong, Beijing's first international visitor to the station. Several Southeast Asian and Pacific states are weighing which lunar club to join, or whether to hedge between both.

Law, not lasers

The Outer Space Treaty declares space "the province of all mankind" and bans national appropriation of celestial bodies. But the treaty was written when only superpowers reached orbit. The Artemis Accords advance a US-friendly reading that permits commercial resource extraction, drawing on a 2015 US law that explicitly recognises the right of American citizens to own, transport and sell space resources. The ILRS, while less legally explicit, presumes a parallel Chinese-led order around the same lunar terrain.

The real risk is not a war on the Moon. It is the fragmenting of the rules, two incompatible regimes claiming legitimacy over the same craters, with neither side willing to defer. For middle powers like New Zealand, the diplomatic challenge in the next five years will be to push for genuine international standards before the south pole is carved up by facts on the ground.

What comes next

Artemis II proved that NASA can still fly humans to the Moon. Shenzhou-23 proved that China can keep three astronauts in orbit for a year and rotate them on schedule. Neither mission, on its own, landed anyone on lunar soil. But each was a signal, to allies, rivals and the watching world, that the race is on, and that the prize is not the Moon itself but the order that will be written there.

Artemis II and Shenzhou-23 were the easy part. What comes next, the landers, the south-pole bases, the legal arguments over who owns what, is where the century actually gets decided. That is the story worth watching from down here.  

-Asia Media Centre