Bill Nelson , NASA administrator , believes that the US will reach the moon before China . However, he fears that his rival will take over the water at the South Pole.
What was once a race against the Soviet Union is now against China . The US wants to beat its greatest space adversary and wants to be first on the Moon . Its objective? Safeguard the water that exists on the satellite.
Bill Nelson , NASA administrator , told El País that he wants to prevent China from arriving earlier and “ensure that the water is theirs, as it has done with the Spratly Islands.”
A new space race
For Nelson, we are precisely in a “new space race.”
China, he points out, wants to reach the Moon by the end of 2030 while they hope to reach it in the middle of the decade, between 2025 and 2026.
“I think the United States will get there first,” says the administrator. “What worries me the most is that both they and we are going to land at the South Pole, where we think there is water,” he adds.
“Water is important because it is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, and that is oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to make rocket fuel. We want to preserve those potential reserves for the international community and prevent China from coming in and claiming that the water is theirs,” he notes.
The head of NASA assures that they will soon seek to send a robotic instrument to the South Pole of the Moon this same 2023 and then send another to dig in search of water in 2024.