CHAD WOLF: Space isn’t just the final frontier, it’s the ‘ultimate high ground’

China advances in the new moon race, but America risks losing strategic space superiority and national security if Beijing establishes lunar dominance first.

Seeing NASA’s struggles with the SLS, Chinese state-backed firms are now mimicking architectures that support fully reusable, self-landing heavy-lift rockets modeled on SpaceX’s Starship. Chad F. Wolf serves as Vice Chairman for American Global Strategies and Chair for Homeland Security, Immigration, and Western Hemisphere policy at the America First Policy Institute. He previously served as acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during President Trump’s first term.

Let me be clear, the fear that China could somehow "claim" the moon by arriving first misunderstands both geography and international reality. Two of the main locations for settlement are the Shackleton Crater, which stretches about the distance from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland, and the South Pole–Aitken Basin, which is roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colo. The moon is vast.

The strategic concern and question for Congress is not who arrives "next," but who establishes a durable, scalable and defensible presence on the lunar surface. China understands this question and is well on their way to develop a reusable launch system to control this terrain and its abundant critical resources within a decade. The U.S. needs to recognize this threat and address it with the urgency it demands.