The latest U.S. crewed space flight has blasted off, but it’s far from the triumph of humanity once celebrated as science fiction comes to life. In reality, it’s the latest move in Washington’s drive for imperial domination of space — a race it’s losing to China and the Global South. As beautiful pictures come in from the mission and inspire the imaginations of millions of people around the world, it is essential to fight against the privatization of technology, exploration, and the common heritage of our Solar System and imagine a system where space is more than just another site of extraction and profit.
NASA has launched its Artemis II mission, which will carry a crew of four astronauts on a 10-day-long flight into orbit around the Moon for the first time in more than half a century, before returning to Earth. The mission is the second in the Artemis program, following an uncrewed flight test in 2022 and aiming to set the stage for a crewed mission to the Moon now expected to be no earlier than 2028.
Originally, Artemis III was planned to return humans to the lunar surface, but after NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel sharply criticized the program’s break-neck pace earlier this year, NASA decided to bump the lunar landing back to Artemis IV.
The launch of Artemis II was originally planned for February, but was delayed after a liquid hydrogen fuel leak was spotted during a dress rehearsal, and then another issue with the supply of helium used to pressurize the fuel tanks was found, NASA rolled the massive rocket back into its hangar for repairs. Either issue could have caused the rocket to explode, killing the four astronauts on board and catastrophically delaying or even resulting in the cancellation of the whole Artemis program.
This would have been a major blow to U.S. imperial plans to deny the rest of the planet access to space and the myriad benefits of space flight — including colossal profits from mineral extraction and military control over the “ultimate high ground.”
Space: the sixth “war domain”
The Artemis program is vastly behind schedule and over budget already, due in large part to the preoccupation with private defense contractor partnerships on the one hand, and a haphazard pace imposed by larger geopolitical concerns on the other. As the U.S. shifted its strategic priority toward “great power competition” with Russia and China in the latter 2010s, and both nations, alongside numerous others in the Global South, began more ambitious space flight programs of their own, a drive to defend American “supremacy” in space became paramount.
The creation of the Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. military; the explosion of contracts for private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to build a bevy of satellites, spacecraft, and launch systems for them; and the Pentagon’s push to engineer treaty-breaking weapons for use in space have defined Washington’s agenda to dominate what it deems the sixth “domain” of warfare.
The Artemis program is not run by the military, but by NASA, which is technically a civilian agency, though in reality outsources critical research and development useful for the private sector to the public sector. In this way NASA, the Pentagon, and the private sector serve to advance the aims of the U.S. capitalist class, which sees untold amounts of wealth in mining operations on the Moon, Mars, and various asteroids across the solar system.
Estimates for the value of rare metals like platinum, iridium, and palladium found within lunar craters are in the trillions of dollars. Currently down here on Earth, the largest suppliers of these metals are South Africa and Russia – two countries increasingly at odds with Washington’s imperial agenda. Securing access to them would line the pockets of the billionaire class in ways they could not begin to imagine.
Alongside the Artemis Program is the Artemis Accords. The Artemis Accords are a framework for international integration and investment into this new phase of U.S. space development. As previously covered by Liberation News, the Artemis Accords are essentially a facade to skirt existing international space law that prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies by creating a framework for privatized exploitation of lunar resources.
As always, the role of the military is to protect the profits of the U.S. capitalist class from all others, whether they’re workers demanding fair compensation for their labor, or rival capitalists looking to edge them out of the market. The risk of a space race igniting another imperial war for resources is very real – and as such a war would not remain confined to space for long, it is the supreme concern of all working and oppressed people down here on the surface, too.
Artemis has been a colossal expense. By fiscal year 2025, the program had already run up a $93 billion bill, with each launch costing between $4-5 billion. By comparison, the previous attempt at reviving crewed lunar flight for NASA – the Constellation program of the late 2000s – was canceled by President Barack Obama as excessively expensive after totaling $9 billion.
‘Safety Third’ for capitalists
So what’s different? To be sure, Artemis is a much bigger program than Constellation, but it’s not just that. A big change has been NASA’s insistence on leaning much more heavily on the privately-owned, for-profit space flight corporations that arose as NASA’s budget receded in the early 21st century.
Many of these are owned by vocal supporters of President Trump’s far-right agenda, including Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, the owner of Blue Origin, both of which have supplied key components of the Artemis program’s rockets and spacecraft. Other parts of the program have recycled elements of past programs, such as parts from the Ares V rocket and the Space Launch System rocket originally intended for the Constellation program.
For-profit companies don’t have the same concerns as state agencies, including safety and efficiency – in fact, Elon Musk once boasted that SpaceX’s philosophy was “Safety Third.”
“There’s not even a Rule Number Two,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “But even though there’s nothing in second place, safety is not getting promoted to number two.” It’s no coincidence that SpaceX is best known for its rockets dramatically falling out of the sky – if they even make it there – rather than for revolutionizing space flight. Yet, this is the company NASA has tasked with designing the Human Landing System for landing on the lunar surface and helping build the now-canceled Lunar Gateway space station in lunar orbit.
Just weeks ago, NASA announced it was so afraid of losing the race to the Moon to China that it was scrapping the Lunar Gateway effort entirely and moving directly to construction of a lunar surface base, expected to begin in 2029. Even with repurposing much of the Lunar Gateway’s habitation technology, the U.S. space agency has projected the base will cost $30 billion between now and 2036. These developments come as SpaceX is looking to raise $50 to $75 billion from public investors as it prepares for its stock market IPO in June.
China’s planned approach to space development
The capitalist preoccupation with doing things through the private sector, where billionaires have the opportunity to profit from the process, is an inherently dragging force on the space program’s efficiency and efficacy. By contrast, the highly centralized, coordinated, and planned nature of China’s space program has ensured it proceeds at-pace, with pieces set into place years in advance.
There is perhaps no better example of that in this moment than the path charted out for CNSA in the 15th Five-Year Plan, adopted earlier this month by the “Two Sessions” of legislative deliberation by the National People’s Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
The Five-Year Plan, the fundamental structure of socialist economic planning in China, lays out a comprehensive approach to expanding the country’s space capabilities, including integrating the designs of commercial satellites and the rockets for launching them, and using state-led satellite networks like the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System to support Chinese civil society and private sector growth. This kind of harmonization is not possible in a capitalist system driven by the chaos of the private market and a winner-takes-all mindset.
At one point early in its space program, China also tried to rely on space companies to supplement its state agencies. But following several catastrophic failures of rockets in the 1990s, the Chinese space program initiated major reforms that resulted in more than 100 successful launches without a single failure between 1996 and 2011.
The first flight of the uncrewed Shenzhou spacecraft, designed for human flight, was performed in 1999, but rather than rush into the achievement before the close of the century, China continued uncrewed tests for three more years, eventually launching taikonaut Yang Liwei into space on October 15, 2003, aboard Shenzhou 5.
That record of putting human safety first is why China has never lost a single taikonaut in the history of its space program. Since 1996, the Chinese space program has proceeded steadily and rapidly, and today China operates its second space station, Tiangong, in Low Earth Orbit, and has sent successful robotic rovers to the Moon and Mars. The Chang’e Project, China’s uncrewed lunar exploration program, has made important scientific discoveries and chalked up numerous firsts for China and for all mankind, including exploring the Moon’s southern polar region and far side that permanently faces away from Earth; placing a relay satellite at the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrangian Point to facilitate far-side communication; and returning the first lunar soil samples to Earth in more than 50 years.
The 15th Five-Year Plan also lays out the next stages of China’s crewed space flight. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) clarified its timeline recently, announcing that China’s own crewed lunar mission is planning to put taikonauts on the Moon by 2030. CMSA has been methodically testing various parts of that program, including the Mengzhou spacecraft, Lanyue lunar lander, and a larger Long March-10 rocket, putting them through a brutal safety evaluations regimen that includes a maximum dynamic pressure escape test and a zero-height abort test, among other safety checks.
Following a crewed mission to the Moon, China also plans to build a permanent lunar settlement in conjunction with numerous other Global South nations, including Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Egypt – which together formed the International Lunar Research Station Cooperation Organization in 2023.
