In a forthcoming memoir, Bill Nelson, former NASA administrator from 2021 to 2025, has issued a stark warning about China's lunar ambitions and argues that the United States must do all it can to maintain space leadership. Nelson characterises the competition with China as the defining contest of the twenty-first century, comparing its stakes to Cold War competition and citing the 2023 Chinese spy balloon incident as evidence of intensifying rivalry. He contends that the next great superpower conflict will be fought not on land or sea, but in the skies and beyond Earth's atmosphere.

The flashpoint of this competition is the Moon's South Pole, where both nations are racing to establish permanent settlements rather than merely planting flags. Nelson describes China as planning "infrastructure for lunar permanence" to occupy resource-rich areas, whilst dismissing the possibility of meaningful cooperation with China's militarised and secretive space programme. Current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has echoed Nelson's urgency, recently emphasising that limited access points at the lunar South Pole create time-critical pressure, particularly as China is partnered with Russia. Nelson argues that "America is not the obvious favourite" in this competition and supports strict limits on NASA-China cooperation through the Wolf Amendment.