A new Moon race?

[ATSA1]

I note that the Chinese have a new crew in Tiangong , planned stay 6 months...
The BBC are today reporting that China plans to land Taikonauts on the Moon by 2030...
With America's Artemis project showing signs of delay, will the next man (or woman) on the Moon be Chinese?

[wiggy]

Who knows?

Artemis 1 launch due late July-early Aug at best..

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/artemis...n-availability

If that goes OK then I guess there's still a chance of a landing on Artemis 3 from 2025 onwards.....

Thinks wistfully back to 1969 when NASA launched four manned Apollo missions on Saturn Vs in nine months; Apollos 9, 10, 11 and 12. They also had contingency plans in place to launch a fifth, Apollo 13 by the end of the year if it had been needed to try and achieve the " end of the decade" commitment......

[NineEighteen]

China presumably have the advantage of not being castrated by political ebb and flow as Nasa finds itself every few years.

Here's hoping that someone responsible achieves that feat and, more importantly, pushes straight onwards from there.

[tdracer]

Originally Posted by NineEighteen

China presumably have the advantage of not being castrated by political ebb and flow as Nasa finds itself every few years.

Here's hoping that someone responsible achieves that feat and, more importantly, pushes straight onwards from there.

There's much more to it than that. In the 1960's, NASA was lean and mean (at least by government standards) with a 'can do' attitude. There are many parallels between 1960's NASA and today's SpaceX.
Today, NASA has morphed into just another bureaucratic monstrosity that is more concerned with protecting their careers than with actually getting things done. In the 1960's, NASA went from the sub-orbital Mercury Redstone to Apollo 8 orbiting the moon in less than 8 years.
It took longer than that from the retirement of the Space Shuttle to when NASA was again capable of putting people into orbit (without depending on the Russians) - and even then they needed Space X to actually get it done.