The Trump administration had set a moon landing goal of 2024 citing, in part, competition with China.
NASA is about to launch its first test flight of its moon-bound Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and crew-capable Orion spacecraft on Monday, August 29.
The uncrewed mission, known as Artemis I, will see Orion circle the moon for several days as mission controllers test its capabilities before it speeds back to Earth at around 24,500 miles per hour, putting its heat shield through its paces.
It’s the first step in NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first time in over 50 years.
In March 2019, Trump’s vice president Mike Pence announced a goal to return humans to the moon by 2024, citing competition from other countries such as China as justification for the target.
“What we need now is urgency,” Pence told the National Space Council at the time.
“Make no mistake about it—we’re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s. And the stakes are even higher. Last December, China became the first nation to land on the far side of the moon and revealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world’s pre-eminent space-faring nation.”
A few years on, the situation hasn’t changed. Today, NASA faces competition not just from China but from Russia, which announced that it would depart from the International Space Station (ISS) in July this year amid strained international tensions as a result of its invasion of Ukraine.
It marks a shift in the American relationship with Russia in space, which only a few years ago remained close.
