NASA's Head Says the Next Astronauts Around the Moon Will Probably Be Chinese

Jared Isaacman said he expects China to fly a crewed mission around the moon in 2027 — before the United States returns. China has not publicly announced such a plan.

Jared Isaacman, the administrator of NASA, said this week that he expects China to send astronauts on a flight around the moon in 2027. "The next time the world tunes in to watch astronauts fly around the moon," he said, "which will likely be sometime in 2027, they will be taikonauts" — the term used for Chinese astronauts.

China has not announced such a mission. Its publicly stated goal is to land people on the moon by 2030, and a crewed loop around it would be a natural rehearsal, in the same way Apollo 8 circled the moon in 1968 before Apollo 11 landed the following year. Isaacman's comment is a prediction by the head of the American space agency, not a Chinese announcement, and it serves an obvious purpose: NASA's own return-to-the-moon program has slipped repeatedly, and a competitor arriving first is the argument most likely to unstick a budget.

The reason it appears on this site is that the moon has become entangled with AI in a way it was not during the first space race. Isaacman's stated objectives for NASA include a permanent lunar base, nuclear power in space, and — explicitly — humanoid robots doing the work that is too dangerous or too dull for people. The vision is not astronauts planting flags. It is machines building infrastructure, with a small number of humans supervising.

That makes the next few years genuinely different from the 1960s. The race is not only about who arrives. It is about whose robots are there, running whose software, when the humans show up.