“Beijing’s intended strategy is to dominate the high ground of the twenty-first century.” //

In a forthcoming memoir, former US politician and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson offers a blistering assessment of China, saying the United States must do all it can to retain its leadership in space exploration.

“Beijing’s intended strategy is to dominate the high ground of the twenty-first century,” writes Nelson in Space Odyssey, a book to be published by Harper Horizon in January 2027. //

Nelson has long been wary of China as a threat to the United States, noting his concerns about technology theft from the West. Unlike his predecessor under a Democratic president—former astronaut Charlie Bolden, who served as NASA leader under President Obama—Nelson supported the Wolf Amendment, which strictly limits cooperation between NASA and China’s space program.

The reason, Nelson says, is that China’s space program is militarized and highly secretive.

“China is not a partner to be trusted,” he writes. “Partnership requires trust, and trust is founded on transparency. With China, despite repeated efforts to build verifiable, rules-based cooperation and set commonsense guard rails for engagement, there has never been much of either.” //

Although he’s no fan of the Trump administration, Nelson does seem to agree with NASA’s current administrator, Jared Isaacman, that this competition is urgent and requires the agency to pursue more than a flags-and-footprints approach. In his 10 months as administrator, Isaacman’s signature initiative has been to launch an effort across NASA and its commercial space ecosystem to build a Moon Base at the lunar South Pole.

China, Nelson writes, is planning “infrastructure for lunar permanence,” seeking to occupy the limited area at the South Pole of the Moon where the most resources are. “They are not sprinting against us to plant another flag; they are settling in for a marathon, an endurance race that will take us deeper into space than humankind has ever dared to venture before,” Nelson writes. //

Being first, and being there for the long haul, matters, Nelson says. And he tells his readers to not be fooled by talk of exploration, especially when it comes to China’s space program. This is a competition for the high ground of the 21st century.

“What looks like exploration on the surface is, in truth, also a raging struggle for space supremacy,” he writes. “This race will determine who sets the rules for a new era of human expansion beyond Earth. For Beijing, this race is not about exploration but about domination, securing the infrastructure of orbit in much the same way empires once seized trade routes and aggressively defended sea lanes.”

Should the United States lose this competition, Nelson writes, “we’ll watch the next frontier slip from our grasp.”