The tragedy we face is not the challenge posed by Chinese space exploration, but the potential that we will not even try to meet it.

There was an element of urgency to interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy’s statement earlier this month announcing his agency’s intention to put a small nuclear reactor on the moon’s surface by 2030.

The project and the scientific ventures it would displace from NASA’s agenda were necessary, in part, because “China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the Moon by the mid-2030s,” the announcement declared. The nation that does that first “could potentially declare a keep-out zone” and “inhibit the United States from establishing” a presence at its preferred lunar landing site. America is “in a race with China to the moon,” Duffy told reporters. If Ars Technica’s reporting is accurate, it’s a race the United States will lose.

China has recently conducted a variety of successful tests of its launch vehicles and lunar lander systems, Ars Technica’s Eric Berger observed, which lends credence to the recent announcement from China’s space agency that Beijing plans to land Taikonauts on the moon “before” 2030. Given the degree to which NASA’s Artemis program has failed to meet expectations and the setbacks private space agencies like SpaceX and Blue Origin experienced in their (still very difficult) attempts to develop reliable lunar landers, “It’s now probable that China will ‘beat’ NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of the new space race.”

Berger noted that lay observers of China’s achievement may respond to it with a yawn. “Been there, done that,” the author posits. In addition, the systems the Chinese will employ to reproduce the feat America pulled off in 1969 look suspiciously like the Apollo program, which isn’t nearly as impressive as the next generation technology public and private interests in the U.S. are developing ahead of America’s return to the moon. What’s to worry about?

“It means the end of American exceptionalism,” George Washington University Space Policy Institute resident fellow Dean Cheng declared. “It means China can do ‘big’ things, and the United States cannot. The US cannot even replicate projects it undertook 50 (or more) years ago.” That is perhaps a bit overwrought. It is unlikely that the PRC will ensure that Mandarin will be the lingua franca of the upper atmosphere if the CNSA beats NASA back to our celestial neighbor. Cheng’s likely right, however, to forecast that a Chinese victory in the new space race would provide a shot in the arm to the Chinese model. Other rising powers might look to it as something worthy of emulation. That was, after all, the Soviet experience in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the American space program languished.

But if the Cold War-era space race is a model, we have less to fear from Taikonauts on the moon than Cheng suggests. By his own admission, only if China “regularly dispatches lunar missions” could it displace the United States in space. Only if the U.S. loses its appetite for competition in Earth’s orbit would we lose the next space race. That is what we should fear.

For decades, visionless and cynical American constituencies have regarded the American space program as an annoying competitor in their quest to gobble up America’s resources. Its benefits are theoretical and intangible, they say, and it consumes taxpayer funds that could be spent on domestic programs. Better to cast largess of the U.S. Treasury into the insatiable maw of the American entitlement state, cosseting Americans in a comfort blanket as we embrace our inevitable decline.

That argument has never prevailed. And yet, it also failed to prevail when it was argued in an era in which the United States was the unquestioned hegemon in the upper atmosphere. Might Americans be more favorable to the colorless fatalism on offer from, say, Senator Bernie Sanders amid real evidence that the United States has reached the limits of its technological and financial potential? It’s not hard to imagine a majority consensus forming around the notion that the U.S. is a spent force, that it should sink into a warm bath, self-medicate, and cede the future to our ambitious competitors abroad.

That is the tragedy we face, not the challenge posed by Chinese space exploration, but the potential that we will not even try to meet it.