The Soviets beat the US at getting a satellite, and a man, into space. Now, the Chinese may get to the moon before the US can make a return visit.
Fifty years after Sputnik became the world's first artificial satellite, a new race is under way with the finish line on the moon. NASA, the former lunar champion, already is predicting defeat.
"I personally believe that China will be back on the moon before we are," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a low-key lecture in Washington two weeks ago, marking the space agency's 50th anniversary, still a year away.
"I think when that happens, Americans will not like it. But they will just have to not like it," he said.
Griffin's candor startled many in the space community, but insiders acknowledge the reality. China has pulled off two manned spaceflights with its own rockets and is eager to head for the moon.
NASA has a 2020 deadline for returning Americans to the moon. China would like to beat that.
It has a probe poised for a launch to the moon, supposedly before year's end. The lunar orbiter is to be followed by a lander and then, by 2017, a robotic mission to return moon rocks. Whether China could land one of its "taikonauts" there before US astronauts arrive is uncertain.
The US is "more technically advanced. We certainly could be back on the moon faster than the Chinese, but we don't have the political will and therefore the resources to do it," said Joan Johnson-Freese, head of the Naval War College's national security decision-making department.
Russia -- the early day winner with the launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, and the first spaceman, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961 -- is no longer the competitor it was under the Soviet Union banner.
Although Russia is a key player in the international space station, with its Soyuz rockets regularly ferrying crews and cargo, it is expecting to team up with the US in the moon arena.
It was just four years ago that China became only the third country in the world to launch its own rockets with people on board. Now it is aiming to build its own space station to orbit Earth, as well as a mission to the moon in 10 to 15 years.
Unlike the intense, cash-heavy days of the late 1950s and 1960s, budget constraints have slowed NASA's previous rocket-fast pace. It will be 16 years from the time US President George W. Bush set the lunar goal in 2004 -- if NASA even gets to the moon by 2020.
NASA insists it is not a race anymore, with grander, longer-range goals than Apollo's flags and footprints.
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