zlacker

>>rbanff+(OP)
This space race is different for one core reason: China is more stable than the Soviet Union was in the 1960s.

If we beat the Chinese somehow, I don't think they'll just dismantle their space program and focus on Earth. They'll keep going, and they have the economic base to expand their program.

I think we're seeing the beginning of a new kind of space race. It's likely to be much longer term and grander in scale over time, as we compete for the best spots on the Moon and the first human landing on Mars in the decades to come.

>>hdivid+ef
> China is more stable than the Soviet Union was in the 1960s

Xi literally just purged “the country’s top military leader, Gen. Zhang Youxia, and an associate, Gen. Liu Zhenli” [1].

This is the mark of a dictator. Not the Soviet Union at its finest.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/us/politics/china-xi-mili...

>>JumpCr+Jf
I agree there is a lot of chaos over there, and numerous challenges. But I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union. It's going to be a long-term space race.

>>hdivid+Jg
> I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union

I don’t either. But the Soviet Union’s space programme lost its steam in the 1970s. (Venus was its last ambitious achievement.)

If China gets bogged down in Taiwan because Xi fired every military expert who might disagree with him, that’s going to cost them the space race. (Same as if America decides to replicate the Sino-Soviet split with Europe over Greenland. We can’t afford a competitive space programme at that point.)

>>JumpCr+ci
There's a question as to whether China's surplus capability is enough to overflow the deprivation that a space program might suffer in a chaos Taiwan scenario.

Their resources and capabilities are obviously substantial and sustained (not going anywhere). The USSR had only a few patches of sustained serious economic output, the rest of the time was rolling from one disaster to another, one deprivation after another.

It seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan, and go to the Moon during the Vietnam War (plus cultural chaos).

That said, China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining. China will ultimately regret not moving on the island sooner when they see how easy it's going to be to take it and how weak the US response will be (the US can't sustain a stand-off with China in that region for more than a few weeks before folding, unless it's willing to go to full war mode economically (which it's not)).