INSIDE THE NEW RACE TO THE MOON

IT’S EASIER TO LOVE APOLLO 11 IF YOU WERE AROUND TO SEE IT HAPPEN. For those who didn’t camp along the Cape Kennedy causeway to watch the Saturn 5 liftoff on July 16, 1969, or huddle around a rabbit-ear TV to watch Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder and walk on the surface of the moon four days later, it’ll always have a whiff of cable-channel documentary. And yet it doesn’t for Elon Musk.

Musk was born in 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, two years after the Apollo 11 landing and half a world away from the country that achieved the great lunar feat. But somehow, he absorbed the primal power of the thing he was not there to see happen. “Apollo 11 was one of the most inspiring things in all of human history,” he said in a July 12 interview at the Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters of SpaceX, the rocket company he founded in 2002 that has since become its own icon of space exploration. “I’m not sure SpaceX would exist if not for Apollo 11.”

Today, SpaceX is one of a handful of powerful players—starry-eyed billionaires and the world’s two richest countries—competing in a race to set up shop on the moon. In the 1960s, it was a two-party sprint between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to be the first to get boots on the lunar surface, but this time around the U.S. finds itself in a bigger, multifront competition with private companies like SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and international powers, most critically China.

Like the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the Cold War, Beijing is using its space ambitions as a powerful ideological—and even expansionist—tool of statecraft. In January, China successfully landed Chang’e-4, a small base station and rover, on the far side of the moon, becoming the first nation to touch down in that unseen hemisphere. “We are building China into a space giant,” Chang’e-4 chief designer Wu Weiren said at the time.

Last year, Ye Peijian, the leader of the country’s lunar program, described the agency’s work by invoking Beijing’s growing dominance across the South China Sea islands: “The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don’t go there now, even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants.” That may just be celestial saber rattling, but it’s gotten the attention of Western observers. “I have no doubt that within the next five years, they will complete [their own space station] and announce a manned lunar program,” says Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national-security affairs with expertise in space, science and technology at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

Driving the new space race is a potent mix of economic, technological and geopolitical imperatives. There are possible fortunes to be made from lunar ventures. Space-based businesses currently contribute $350 billion to global gross domestic