They are already losing the current space race before it even officially started. Just look at China’s achievements in this field the last few years and compare it to fuckall that NASA has been doing. China has a new space station that will outlive the ISS which is fast approaching the end of its life span. Has the West been building any replacements? Of course not. They took decades to finish the James Webb space telescope, and i remember that being the “new hotness” in astrophysics back when i was in university and that is already many years ago, everyone was talking about it as if it was going to come online any minute now but by the time they got it up over a decade later it was already outdated.
NASA planing to use SpaceX’s Starship as the Human Landing System, has convinced me that China will step foot on the moon before Artemis III.
