The New Space Race: Power, Politics, and the Future of Lunar Control

On a February night in 2024, a squat, hexagonal robot dropped toward the Moon’s south pole, carrying the ambitions of a new space age.

In a control room in Houston, engineers with Intuitive Machines waited as their Nova‑C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, descended in near real time. When the signal finally came, there was relief: the lander had become the first American spacecraft to touch the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first private vehicle ever to do so.

Then came the fine print. Odysseus had come down hard, tipping onto its side. Several instruments were left pointing the wrong way. The mission was shortened. The triumphant “return to the Moon” looked a little less photogenic than the Apollo era.

For journalist David Ariosto, that awkward landing is the starting point for a larger story about what is really at stake in today’s rush back to space. In his new book, Open Space, and in a one‑page review published this month in the journal Science, the picture that emerges is not just one of scientific curiosity or national prestige, but of a race to build and control the infrastructure that powers life on Earth.

“The victors of today’s space race stand to have unprecedented power on Earth,” science writer Jaime Herndon warns in the Science review of Ariosto’s book.

That is a bold claim to make in a cautious, heavily vetted journal. It reflects a quiet but profound shift in how space works — and who it works for.

From moonshot to utility grid

During the Cold War, space was an arena of symbolism. The United States and the Soviet Union sought to prove ideological and technological superiority by lofting rockets, satellites and humans into the heavens. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in 1969, it was less about mining regolith than beating Moscow.

The 21st‑century “space race” looks different. Satellites now route financial transactions, guide ships and aircraft, time power grids, steer tractors and provide the only broadband some rural communities can get. Weather and climate satellites underpin storm forecasting and track rising seas and greenhouse gases. Navigation constellations such as GPS, Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS and China’s BeiDou keep everything from ride‑hailing apps to container ports in sync.

By some estimates, the global space economy was worth more than half a trillion dollars in the mid‑2020s and could nearly triple by the mid‑2030s. Communications, navigation and Earth observation account for the bulk of that activity.

In that context, power in space increasingly translates to leverage on the ground.

“Space is no longer about flags and footprints; it’s about who controls the data and the services that modern societies run on,” said Namrata Goswami, an independent space policy analyst, in a recent interview. “That’s what changes the stakes.”

A new cast of competitors

In Ariosto’s telling, the February 2024 Odysseus landing is emblematic of a broader shift: a private company, paid by NASA under a Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract, doing work that would once have been carried out by a national agency.

Intuitive Machines talks openly about “establishing a new lunar economy,” positioning its landers as cargo haulers to a future Moon base. The Odysseus mission was only partly successful, but it showed that a relatively small firm, not a superpower, could put hardware on the Moon.

At the same time, the United States is trying to reassert itself in deep space with its Artemis program. Artemis II, which launched in early April 2026, is flying four astronauts on the first crewed trip around the Moon in more than 50 years. Later missions are intended to place crews on the lunar surface and build a sustained presence near the south pole, where water ice is believed to lie in permanently shadowed craters.

The U.S. is not alone. China has announced plans to land its own astronauts on the Moon by 2030, using a new Long March 10 rocket and a lander known as Lanyue. Beijing and Moscow are promoting an International Lunar Research Station as a rival to the U.S.‑led Artemis campaign, courting other nations to join.

“The stakes of this contest are immense: Supremacy in space confers dominance terrestrially,” analysts for the Washington‑based Jamestown Foundation wrote in a 2023 assessment of China’s lunar ambitions.

India, which landed its Chandrayaan‑3 spacecraft near the Moon’s south pole in 2023, and U.S. allies such as Japan, Europe, Canada and the United Arab Emirates are also pushing new missions. South Korea, among others, has designated satellites and launch technology as industrial priorities, investing heavily to build domestic capability.

Unlike the bipolar U.S.‑Soviet rivalry of the 1960s, this is a multi‑player race. It is also increasingly commercial.

Billionaires, bureaucrats and mega‑constellations

No single development captures that better than the rise of satellite “mega‑constellations” — vast fleets of small spacecraft providing broadband and other services.

SpaceX’s Starlink system, built and operated by Elon Musk’s company, has already launched more than 10,000 satellites into low Earth orbit, more than all other operators combined. Starlink beams internet to homes, planes, ships and remote communities worldwide and is testing direct‑to‑cellphone services. A separate line of business, Starshield, offers more tailored communications and imaging services to U.S. government agencies.

Other companies, including OneWeb and Amazon’s Kuiper, are racing to catch up with their own constellations. China is developing rival networks under state‑linked firms.

For governments, these systems are both an opportunity and a vulnerability. They extend connectivity and can bypass damaged terrestrial infrastructure. They also hand enormous influence to a small number of corporations.

In Ukraine, where Starlink terminals have been used by both civilians and military units, Musk’s decisions to restrict certain uses of the network have repeatedly drawn scrutiny. The episode highlighted how the judgment of a single executive can ripple through geopolitics when public authorities rely on private infrastructure.

“This is the first time in history that a private company has had a decisive impact on a major war because it controls a critical infrastructure,” said Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester, in a recent panel discussion.

China, meanwhile, is building its own space backbone. Beyond its satellites, it has assembled a global deep‑space tracking network, including a large ground station in Neuquén province in Argentina. Argentine officials say the facility is civilian and scientific. The U.S. government has expressed concern about the lack of transparency and the fact that China’s space program is run by the People’s Liberation Army.

Law from another era

As more actors crowd into orbit and head toward the Moon, the legal framework governing their behavior is straining.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, ratified at the height of the Cold War, established that outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, cannot be claimed as national territory. It requires countries to supervise their private operators and to avoid harmful contamination and interference. It forbids weapons of mass destruction in orbit.

It says little about conventional weapons, and nothing about mega‑constellations, private lunar mining or autonomous probes guided by artificial intelligence.

In 2015, Congress passed — and President Barack Obama signed — a law granting U.S. companies the right to “possess, own, transport, use and sell” resources they extract from asteroids or other celestial bodies, while insisting that the United States was not asserting sovereignty over those bodies. Luxembourg adopted a similar law in 2017, part of an effort to attract space‑resource firms.

Supporters argue that such laws provide legal certainty for investors and are consistent with the outer space treaty. Critics contend they amount to a unilateral redefinition of what “non‑appropriation” means.

The United States has also spearheaded the Artemis Accords, a set of principles for lunar and deep‑space exploration that more than two dozen countries have signed. The accords endorse transparency, interoperability and the idea that resource extraction can be carried out under existing international law.

They also introduce the concept of “safety zones” — areas around lunar and other operations where others are expected to avoid interference. U.S. officials describe these as coordination measures. Some foreign analysts see them as a step toward de facto territorial control.

Russia and China, which are not part of the accords, have cast their International Lunar Research Station as an alternative platform with its own governance arrangements. That raises the prospect of competing legal clubs in space, with different standards for behavior and resource rights.

Crowded skies, invisible risks

Even in near‑Earth orbit, where no one is mining anything yet, competition is creating hazards.

Tracking networks count nearly 30,000 cataloged pieces of debris larger than a softball circling the planet: dead satellites, spent rocket stages and fragments from collisions and anti‑satellite weapons tests. Models suggest there are more than a million smaller shards capable of damaging or destroying a spacecraft on impact.

As companies launch thousands of new satellites into already popular altitudes, the risk of chain‑reaction collisions increases. Regulators are beginning to respond; in 2023, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopted a rule requiring most new low‑Earth‑orbit satellites to de‑orbit within five years of mission end, down from a long‑standing 25‑year guideline.

Astronomers have warned that the proliferation of bright satellites is also interfering with ground‑based telescopes. Environmental groups worry about reentry pollution and the impact of rocket launches on the upper atmosphere.

“It’s like building highways before you have traffic laws or police,” said Moriba Jah, a space traffic expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “Everybody is rushing to put stuff up there, but we don’t have consensus rules to keep it sustainable.”

Who benefits — and who decides?

While the risks mount, space also continues to deliver public benefits.

Earth‑observing satellites provide the only consistent, global view of changing climate conditions, from melting ice sheets to deforestation in the Amazon. They underpin early warning systems for hurricanes and floods, guide humanitarian responses and help governments track progress toward emissions pledges.

NASA, the European Space Agency and other organizations have made much of that data free and open, framing it as a global public good.

Questions remain about who will own the next layers of the space economy — lunar resource extraction, in‑orbit manufacturing, commercial space stations — and how the benefits will be distributed.

NASA has emphasized diversity in its Artemis astronaut corps, flying the first woman, the first person of color and the first non‑American beyond low Earth orbit on Artemis II. Advocates say that symbolic choices matter, signaling who belongs in the future being built.

Behind those images, however, decisions about standards, contracts and laws are being made in ways that are less visible to the public.

In her brief review in Science, Herndon notes that Ariosto’s book traces not just rockets and robots but also treaties, corporate strategies and quiet deals in far‑flung places like a Chinese‑run tracking station in Argentina and a Mars analog habitat in the Utah desert. Together, they point toward a world in which the boundary between “space power” and earthly power is increasingly blurred.

The awkward image of Odysseus lying on its side near the lunar south pole may fade. The infrastructure that missions like it are meant to seed — a network of landers, bases, satellites and legal regimes — will not.

As governments, companies and coalitions race to build that network, the question is less who plants the first flag than who will control the switches, write the rules and decide who gets access when the next crisis hits.