NASA Administrator Expects China to Conduct Crewed Lunar Mission by 2027

On May 19, 2026, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood before a space industry audience at the ASCEND conference and delivered a blunt warning: "The next time the world tunes in to watch astronauts fly around the moon, which will likely be sometime in 2027, they will be taikonauts, and America will no longer be the exclusive power to send humans into the lunar environment" [1]. The statement marked the sharpest public escalation yet in U.S. rhetoric about Chinese space ambitions — and it came from the head of the agency responsible for ensuring America gets there first.

Isaacman's prediction did not emerge from nowhere. It reflects a convergence of Chinese hardware progress, American schedule slippage, and an intensifying debate about whether treating the Moon as a finish line serves U.S. interests at all.

What China Is Actually Building

China has not publicly announced a crewed circumlunar mission for 2027. But the hardware trajectory tells a story. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) completed a major integrated flight test on February 10, 2026, simultaneously validating a high-altitude launch abort system for its next-generation Mengzhou crew capsule and a controlled, propulsive landing of the Long March 10 rocket's first stage [2]. The Long March 10A — a smaller variant designed for crew transport to low Earth orbit — is expected to fly first, with the full-scale Long March 10 targeting its debut orbital flight in late 2026 or early 2027 [3].

Independent analysts assess that all necessary conditions for the Long March 10's first launch mission could be ready by 2027 [3]. Two Long March 10 launches would be required for China's first crewed lunar landing, which Beijing has targeted for 2029 or 2030 [2]. A circumlunar flyby — sending astronauts around the Moon and back without landing — would require only a single launch and far less technical validation.

The intelligence community and open-source space analysts have broadly corroborated the 2027 window for a possible circumlunar mission, though with caveats. China's space program operates with less public schedule accountability than NASA, and the absence of an official announcement leaves the timeline partly speculative. What is not speculative is the pace: CMSA returned lunar samples via the Chang'e-6 mission in 2024, operates the Tiangong space station, and has met or beaten its publicly stated timelines for the past decade [4].

How Far Artemis Has Slipped

The contrast with NASA's timeline is stark. When the Artemis program was announced in 2019, the target for a crewed lunar landing was 2024. That date slipped to 2025, then 2026 [5]. In January 2026, NASA pushed Artemis III to no earlier than 2028, before Isaacman revised the plan further in February [6].

Source: NASA / SpacePolicyOnline

Data as of May 21, 2026CSV

Under the restructured program, Artemis III will no longer attempt a lunar landing at all. Instead, it will conduct rendezvous and docking tests in low Earth orbit with commercially developed lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin [6]. The actual crewed lunar landing has been pushed to Artemis IV, scheduled for no earlier than 2028 [6]. Isaacman confirmed this timeline before the House Appropriations Committee on April 27, 2026, explaining that delays in both SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System (HLS) and Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander had forced the change [6].

The program has also shed scope. NASA canceled the Exploration Upper Stage for the SLS rocket, scrapped plans for more powerful SLS variants, and paused work on Gateway, the planned lunar space station [6].

The causes of delay are distributed. SpaceX's Starship, which will serve as the HLS, has completed 11 suborbital test flights but suffered multiple catastrophic mishaps in 2025 that grounded the vehicle for weeks [5]. Boeing's SLS rocket, while having flown successfully on Artemis I, cost roughly $4.1 billion per launch in its early missions. The heat shield on Artemis I performed below expectations, requiring extensive investigation that delayed Artemis II to April 2026 [5].

The total cost of the Artemis program between 2012 and 2025 reached approximately $93 billion, according to NASA's Office of Inspector General [7]. Congress provided an additional $9.9 billion through a reconciliation bill in mid-2025, including $4.1 billion for SLS with a mandated floor of $1.025 billion per year through FY 2029, and $2.6 billion for Gateway [7].

The Budget Gap — and Why It's Misleading

NASA's annual budget stands at approximately $25.4 billion, compared to China's estimated $14.2 billion in total government space spending [8]. But comparing these figures directly is misleading for several reasons.

Source: Planetary Society / Euroconsult

Data as of May 21, 2026CSV

NASA's budget covers planetary science, Earth observation, aeronautics, and the James Webb Space Telescope alongside human spaceflight. China's figure likely includes some military space activities that would fall under the Department of Defense budget in the United States [8]. And purchasing power parity matters: engineering labor in China costs substantially less than in the U.S., meaning Beijing gets more hardware per dollar spent.

The trend lines are also moving in opposite directions. The Trump administration's proposed FY 2026 budget cut NASA to $18.9 billion — a reduction of roughly $6 billion — and slashed space science activities by 47% [8]. China, meanwhile, has committed to approving eight additional space science missions by 2027, 16 more by 2035, and upwards of 30 by 2050 [4].

Does the Apollo Analogy Hold?

Isaacman and other U.S. officials have repeatedly invoked the 1960s space race to frame the current competition. The analogy has surface appeal: two superpowers racing to demonstrate technological superiority through lunar missions. But the structural differences are significant.

During the Apollo era, NASA consumed roughly 4.4% of the federal budget at its peak in 1966. Today, NASA's share is approximately 0.5%. The Apollo program employed 400,000 workers across its contractor base; Artemis relies on a far smaller workforce distributed across commercial partners. The Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a direct ideological contest where space achievements served as proxies for the superiority of their respective systems. The U.S.-China competition, while real, operates within a deeply intertwined economic relationship — the two nations trade over $700 billion in goods annually.

Dr. Namrata Goswami, a space policy scholar, has argued that "the competition for the Moon between the United States and China is less a traditional race and more a strategic scramble for long-term presence and resources" [9]. This distinction matters for policy: a race implies a single finish line after which the competition ends, while a strategic scramble suggests the competition is ongoing and diffuse.

What's Actually at Stake on the Moon

The strategic consequences of China reaching the Moon first — or establishing a sustained presence — are debated among experts, with some concerns more grounded than others.

Lunar resources: The lunar south pole contains water ice in permanently shadowed craters, which could be converted to drinking water, breathable oxygen, and rocket propellant. Whoever establishes infrastructure to extract these resources first gains a practical advantage, though the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits national sovereignty claims over celestial bodies [10]. The treaty does not, however, clearly address resource extraction rights, creating a legal gray zone that both the Artemis Accords and China's ILRS framework attempt to fill from different directions.

International partnerships: As of May 2026, 67 countries have signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords, which establish norms for transparency, interoperability, and resource use in space [10]. China and Russia have countered with the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which has attracted 17 countries and over 50 research institutions [11]. A few nations — notably Thailand and Senegal — have signed onto both frameworks [10]. If China demonstrates lunar capability before the U.S. does, fence-sitting nations may conclude that the ILRS framework offers a more reliable path to lunar access.

Military positioning: The Moon has no direct military utility in the conventional sense — it is too far away to serve as a weapons platform. But cislunar space (the volume between Earth and the Moon) is increasingly relevant for satellite servicing, space domain awareness, and positioning. The ability to operate in this region signals broader space capability.

The Legal Landscape

Three major international instruments govern lunar activities. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, signed by 115 nations including the U.S. and China, establishes that space exploration shall be carried out for the benefit of all countries, prohibits weapons of mass destruction in space, and bars national appropriation of celestial bodies [10].

The 1979 Moon Agreement attempted to go further, declaring lunar resources the "common heritage of mankind" and proposing an international regime to govern their extraction. Only 18 nations ratified it; neither the U.S., China, nor Russia signed [10].

The Artemis Accords, launched in 2020, are not a treaty but a set of bilateral agreements. They affirm that resource extraction is consistent with the Outer Space Treaty — a position China disputes. With 67 signatories as of May 2026, including major space-faring nations like Japan, South Korea, the UK, France, and Italy, they represent the broadest governance framework for lunar activities, though their non-binding nature limits enforcement [10].

China has advanced its own legal position through the ILRS partnership agreements and through advocacy at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). Beijing argues that the Artemis Accords' permissive stance on resource extraction circumvents multilateral negotiation and effectively allows spacefaring nations to claim the most valuable lunar sites through first use [12].

The Wolf Amendment and the Cooperation Question

One of the sharpest policy critiques of the current dynamic comes from those who argue that the U.S. is legally preventing the kind of cooperation that could reduce tensions. The Wolf Amendment, passed in 2011 and renewed annually in appropriations bills, prohibits NASA from using government funds for bilateral cooperation with China or Chinese-affiliated organizations without FBI and congressional authorization [13].

The amendment was motivated by technology transfer concerns — a 1999 congressional report alleged that U.S. satellite manufacturers had provided China with information that improved its missile capabilities [13]. Proponents point to China's official "Military-Civil Fusion" strategy as evidence that civilian space cooperation would inevitably benefit the Chinese military.

Critics call the policy counterproductive. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, has described the ban as a "deplorable 'own goal' by the US" [13]. The Harvard International Review has argued that the amendment "actually increases the risk of war in space" by eliminating channels for communication and norm-setting [14]. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has characterized it as a "bad idea," noting that it "has neither discouraged Chinese space ambitions or altered China's behavior on human rights — it has only muddled our relationship with China and created an opening for a challenger to NASA's leadership role in space exploration" [15].

Meanwhile, while the U.S. has been legally barred from cooperating with Beijing in space, China has signed space partnership agreements with Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa, and nations across Latin America [13].

Defenders of the Wolf Amendment counter that China's intellectual property theft record has not improved since 2011, and that its human rights record — particularly regarding Xinjiang and Hong Kong — has deteriorated. They argue that the Military-Civil Fusion doctrine means no meaningful distinction exists between China's civilian and military space programs [13].

Who Gains, Who Loses

The outcome of the lunar competition will ripple through a network of commercial and government stakeholders.

SpaceX and Blue Origin hold NASA's two Human Landing System contracts, together worth over $10 billion. Further delays risk funding uncertainty and congressional scrutiny. SpaceX's Starship is central not just to Artemis but to its broader commercial business model; repeated failures erode investor and government confidence [5].

Boeing faces existential questions about SLS. A 2025 budget proposal sought to cancel SLS after Artemis III, though Congress preserved funding [7]. If Artemis timelines continue to slip, the case for the expendable SLS against commercial alternatives weakens further.

International partners — the European Space Agency, Japan's JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency — have invested in Artemis through contributions to Gateway and the Orion service module. Gateway's pause disrupts their programmatic plans and threatens to undermine confidence in NASA as a reliable partner [6].

ILRS partners — including Pakistan, the UAE, Venezuela, South Africa, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, and Serbia — stand to gain prestige and potential technology access if China demonstrates lunar capability on schedule [11].

Emerging space nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America face a choice between two competing frameworks, each offering different partnership terms, governance norms, and levels of proven capability.

Is "Space Race" the Right Frame?

Some of the most pointed criticism has come from those who argue the race framing itself distorts policy. An analysis published by Frontiers in Space Technologies argued that U.S.-China competition is eroding the concept of space as a "global commons," replacing shared governance with competing spheres of influence [16]. The Atlantic Council has made a case for U.S.-China space cooperation, arguing that joint missions could build the kind of communication channels that reduce the risk of miscalculation in an increasingly contested domain [17].

Current conditions have been described as "unmanaged competition" — a dynamic where "there are no restraints, framework, or enforcement mechanisms to constrain actors" — analogous to early Cold War nuclear competition before arms control agreements emerged [9].

Others push back on this critique. They argue that cooperation with China would legitimize its governance model, provide technology access that Beijing would use for military purposes, and undermine the Artemis Accords framework that 67 nations have now endorsed. In this view, the race framing is not a distortion but an accurate description of a zero-sum competition for resources, positioning, and alliance leadership.

What Happens Next

The near-term timeline is relatively clear. Artemis II — a crewed flyby of the Moon without landing — is scheduled for 2026. If it succeeds, it will be the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. China's Long March 10 is expected to make its first orbital test flight in late 2026 or early 2027 [3]. If Isaacman's assessment is correct, a Chinese crewed circumlunar mission could follow before NASA's Artemis IV attempts a landing in 2028.

The longer-term competition centers on sustained presence. China's ILRS envisions a basic lunar south pole station by 2035 [11]. NASA's plans for a sustained presence depend on Gateway, currently paused, and on commercial lander development that has yet to prove itself in the lunar environment.

Isaacman has used the competitive framing to argue for accelerating Artemis and expanding commercial partnerships. Whether that framing produces good policy — or merely more urgency without the budget and institutional follow-through to match — remains the central unresolved question.