[Salon] Sino-American Space Race -

From Adam Tooze's Chartbook August 11, 2024 As China races against the US for dominance in space, Beijing is way ahead of Washington in operating lunar rovers to explore the moon’s surface. While NASA’s been working on a plan to put a vehicle back on the moon, that is at risk of becoming a victim of budget battles in Congress. When it comes to lunar longevity, nothing can beat China’s Yutu-2. The Chinese rover first began tooling around on the moon’s far side in 2019. Last we heard, it’s still operational, thanks to a heater powered by radioactive plutonium-238 that keeps it alive during the long and cold lunar night. There was also a Chinese rover on Chang’e-6, the sample-retrieval mission that returned to Earth from the far side in June. Last year India landed a rover, but its solar-powered system couldn’t survive two weeks without any sunlight. Japan’s lunar mission, with two small vehicles, made it through two lunar nights early this year before ending its mission. NASA hasn’t had wheels on the lunar surface since the moon buggies driven by the Apollo astronauts. That was supposed to change with the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (Viper) mission, a plan to have a robotic rover spend 100 days searching for ice and other potential resources at the lunar south pole. The agency had planned on having Viper fly to the moon in 2023 on a spacecraft from Pittsburgh-based startup Astrobotic, but the company early this year failed in its first attempt to land on the moon, setting back the timing for the launch of the company’s Griffin Mission One. On July 17, NASA stunned many in the scientific community by abruptly announcing the rover’s cancellation. It’s the latest victim of the debt-ceiling deal President Joe Biden struck with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year capping spending on many parts of the government. While critics call for Congress to reject the cancellation, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy says they need to think about the bigger picture as the agency struggles with major fiscal constraints. “People get very committed to a single program, and they forget that it’s a zero-sum game,” she told me recently. “The challenge that you have in these situations that I don’t think people seem to understand is if one program overruns, you are going to have to take money away from another program — and potentially cancel a different program in order to pay for those costs.” Melroy added: “It’s not like this is just, you know, free money.” The uncertainty after the Astrobotic failure may have been fatal, said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society. “NASA’s on the hook for paying for an extended period of basically freezing the team in place and paying salaries and overhead and costs that they just don't have for a landing system that is at least one year out and probably more,” he said. The Viper under development in 2021.Source: NASA While NASA has already spent about $450 million on the rover, the agency decided it couldn’t afford to wait. By July 30, more than 4,400 people signed an open letter to Congress asking lawmakers to block NASA’s decision to cancel the program and keep it funded. A Senate subcommittee on July 25 revealed its proposal for NASA funding, which included a modest increase of $30 million more than the Biden administration requested for lunar exploration. Don’t count on any of that money going to Viper” …