The United States won the initial space race in the 1960s, but it could lose a far more consequential Space Marathon in the years to come. Recent events may foreshadow the end of an American-led order among the stars, with civilizational consequences for both Christianity and foreign policy, as China and other adversaries stand eager to make a bid against American dominance.
America is currently the undisputed steward of space. Since 2019, the United States has been consistently responsible for more than half of all objects launched into the cosmos by any country, and no other country shows any sign of mounting a serious bid against that record. In fact, in 2023, the United States flung more than 2,166 objects into the heavens (more than 80 percent of the total). The runners up were the United Kingdom (5.4 percent), China (4.8 percent), and Russia (2.3 percent).
More importantly, to this day, the United States remains the only country to succeed in sending men to tread the dusty surface of the Moon. In 1969, two astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, left Earth behind to make “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” touching for the first time what astronomers had only dreamed of.
The Apollo missions planted not only the American flag in outer space, but also our deepest cultural values. The year before the Moon landing, the crew of Apollo 8 broadcast the Bible to one billion people, about a quarter of the Earth’s population in 1968. As the astronauts of that mission beheld the Lord’s handiwork from beyond the veil of Earth’s atmosphere, they took turns reading the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
During his 1969 mission, Aldrin, an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA), took communion on the surface of the Moon. As he later reflected: “We had come to the Moon in the name of all mankind… but at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge… the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.”
As mundane as some of these details might seem, consider the alternative. For the first years of the space race, the Soviet Union held a considerable lead over the United States. In 1958, the Soviets terrified the world by launching the first satellite into orbit. In 1961, it sent the first human being into space. When cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin returned, the Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev used the opportunity to belittle Christianity: “Why are you clinging to God? Here Gagarin flew into space and didn’t see God.”
The space race could easily have gone to the Soviets. In 1959, they made first physical contact with the Moon, crash-landing Luna 2 on its surface. In 1966, Luna 9 achieved the first successful soft landing on the Moon. And even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States remained embarrassingly dependent on Russian rockets. From the 1990s until 2020, NASA had to rely on the good graces of the Russians for rides up to space.
In the same way, the Space Marathon could conceivably go to the Chinese today. And much like the Soviets, the Chinese Communist Party does not go into space to encounter a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” It goes to advance tianxia (“all under heaven”), what Michael Sobolik has characterized as “China’s mission of spreading its cultural values beyond its borders.”
While still fledgling in its capacity, the Chinese space program has made significant advances. In 2013, its Chang’e 4 mission made the first successful soft landing on the Moon since the Soviets’ mission in 1976. And in 2019, Chang’e 4 accomplished the first landing by any country on the far side of the Moon.
Finally, the days of relevance of the International Space Station (ISS), long a symbol of American-led collaboration in low-earth orbit, are increasingly numbered. Potentially the most expensive object ever built, the ISS is the product of partnerships between the United States (which has provided the lion’s share of the ISS’s funding), Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada.
With a decommissioning set for 2030, countries like China are already jockeying to supplant the ISS with an international space station in their own image. The core of their Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) Space Station launched in 2021, and China has ready collaborators in Russia as well as NATO treaty allies like France and Germany through the European Space Agency.
Perhaps emboldened by the launch of Tiangong’s core module and the alternative order in space it symbolizes, Russia fired an anti-satellite missile later that same year, creating a debris field just above the orbit of the ISS that U.S. Space Command warns poses “a significant risk to the crew.” China itself has endangered the ISS with its own anti-satellite strike in 2007, which produced hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris near ISS orbit.
It is time to read the writing on the walls: either the U.S. will lead and its values will prevail, or another will take her mantle and set the international agenda. While the Biden-Harris administration has gone out of its way to emphasize collaboration and partnership with China, it is clear that the Chinese Communist Party wants to relegate the U.S. to obsolescence.
Rather than try to win over hardened adversaries, American policymakers should return to the posture of the Trump-Pence administration, which reinvigorated the National Space Council in 2017 and created the Space Force in 2019. Critics complaining that the latter effort broke norms in “militarizing space” must have forgotten the terror of hundreds of millions of Americans in 1957 as the Soviet satellite Sputnik hurtled overhead. Space was militarized a long time ago; it’s best that we acknowledge it.
While America continues to hold pole position in space, nothing is guaranteed in the much longer competition to assert dominance everywhere from low-earth orbit to the Moon and Mars beyond. The winner of that competition will determine what values—Western or Marxist—we launch forward into the cosmos.
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