The cuts to Nasa’s budget proposed by the Trump administration will have consequences far beyond the United States. Now the European Space Agency has warned that these reductions could lead to setbacks, or even cancellation, for 19 joint projects. Not only would this extinguish continental supply chains which produce critical spaceflight technology, but it could also cost Europe its place on the Moon. Most importantly, however, Trump’s recent actions may be paving the way for what Xi Jinping has called China’s “eternal dream”: the conquest of space.

Beijing plans to land on the Moon within five years, and intends to build a base there in the next decade. As former Nasa engineer Casey Handmer explains: “They will claim prime real estate around the polar craters, defend it as the sovereign territory of a nuclear-armed state and place a permanent chokehold on the future of humanity.”

Two years ago, Chinese scientists unveiled plans for a CCP reactor on the Moon. The project was designed by Mei Hongyuan, a loyal party member and engineer who designed facilities for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The 2008 Summer Olympics in the same city were but the first small step towards what the Chinese Communists call “national rejuvenation”. The final step is not the recapture of Taiwan — although that is certainly part of the plan — but instead dominance in space. China’s space ambitions point to mining asteroids, colonising Mars, and building space stations.

Nasa was created in 1958 in response to Sputnik, with the goal of beating the Soviet Union in the space race and safeguarding space for the benefit of free nations. It remains the last American universalist promise still standing. But this mission is at risk of failing if the current administration allows Nasa to continue on its path of decline.

The West may no longer stand for much in a world of tariffs and hard-boiled neo-mercantilism, but its purpose is far clearer when it comes to space. Russia, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Belarus have already made their choice — they intend to colonise the Moon alongside Xi.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed cutting Nasa’s funding by 50% and cancelling 40 science projects and missions. The agency is clearly a shadow of its former self. Once a high-performing organisation and the epitome of technical excellence, it has become a bloated bureaucracy — clinging to legacy projects and blind to the paradigm shift represented by SpaceX.

Elon Musk’s company has dramatically reduced launch costs, triggering a new era of space exploration. Nasa, however, chose to ignore this progress, continuing to rely on 60-year-old hardware — the Space Launch System, which is essentially repurposed Space Shuttle technology — wasting billions of dollars in so doing.

As Robert Zubrin argues in The Case for Space, the revolution sparked by SpaceX “opens the entire solar system to human settlement and resource utilization, fundamentally changing humanity’s relationship with space from occasional visits to permanent expansion”. Despite having the technological capabilities to fly to the Moon before CCP cosmonauts are available, Nasa refuses to seize this advantage. Institutional sclerosis remains an obstacle, and only a structural revolution can bring about real change.

Entrepreneur and astronaut Jared Isaacman was the man with a plan to reform Nasa. A Musk ally, his two key priorities were de-bureaucratisation and accelerating timelines for missions to the Moon. To ensure that the Moon remained a domain open to the free world, earlier this year he proposed deploying crack teams of engineers working in the spirit of the “aggressive, hungry, mission-first culture” that the agency last embodied in the Sixties.

Isaacman’s nomination for Nasa administrator was rejected, however. He became collateral damage in a squabble between Musk and Trump. Future Chinese historians won’t need propaganda to describe this watershed moment in the scramble for space: the free Western nations lost due to a spat on X.

Still, losing space to anti-Western powers is a choice. And it’s one that can yet be reversed, for the sake of future generations and to uphold the promise of a free, high frontier.

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Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski is a writer from Poland.

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