Technology, Connected - Blocking China From Space May Have Backfired

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

China built its space station Tiangong in three years after being excluded from the ISS. It landed on the Moon twice—2020 and 2024—returning samples from high helium-3 areas. Now the race is for resources and rules.Glen Martin (aerospace designer, ISS contributor) explains how China's space program connects: high-speed rail expertise at home translates to orbital infrastructure. Grid power systems scale to space stations. Industrial coordination enables lunar missions.The timeline: 2029 crewed lunar landing planned for the 80th anniversary of the 1949 revolution. They're on track.What they've already done:- Built Tiangong space station (operational, continuously crewed)- Landed on lunar far side using relay satellites and nuclear-powered rover- Collected samples from helium-3 rich regions (twice)- Demonstrated industrial-speed space development (3 years for Tiangong vs ISS decades)Why the lunar south pole matters: "Rim of eternal light" has 24-hour sunlight plus water ice in permanently shadowed craters. Perfect for long-term habitation.The rules fight:- UN Space Resources Treaty draft due 2027 (two years before China's planned landing)- US domestic space laws say "just go mine it" (no international permission needed)- Deep sea mining comparison: UN trying to regulate, countries acting unilaterally- Wild West vs regulated approach—which wins?Who decides what happens on the Moon? Right now, nobody. That's the problem—and the opportunity.China wasn't invited to play ISS. So they built their own game.---Guest: Glen Martin, Aerospace Designer | ISS Contributor, Extraterrestrial Mining Company CEOTopics: China space program, Tiangong, Moon landing, helium-3, space law, UN treaty, lunar resourcesFormat: Short episode--📺Watch on YouTube--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Chinese Infrastructure(00:47) Bringing Russia to ISS(01:21) We Blocked The Chinese(01:41) Tiangong & 2029 Moon Landings(02:22) The Global Politics Of Space(03:36) The Lunar South Pole(04:07) The United Nations(04:41) The Moon Wild West--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]

Are some countries moving quicker than others? Are they more ambitious? Do they have more readily accessible goals? The big gorilla in the room is China. If you want to talk about high-speed rail, well, I don't know the statistics, but it looks like in, I don't know, 20 years, they've completely blanketed their country in high-speed rail. They could build a brand-new station in 12 hours. And they're doing the same with high-voltage electricity lines.

They're building a massive solar and wind facilities. the northwest of the country and linking that down to the population centers, they have absolutely cracked the code. And when I was a design on station, you know, in 1992 I was called in a conference room over a weekend, Thanksgiving weekend, actually, to redesign the elements that we were building to bring in Russians, to bring in the Russian components to do station keeping and resupply. Because we, after the fall of Soviet Union and then the Dumont when Yeltsin came in, We decided that we didn't want the Russians to do, you know, build nuclear weapons for bad actors. So we wanted to embrace them and bring them into the space station, which we did successfully.

And to this day, even with the war and everything else going on in Ukraine, the Russians are still flying to the space station. We still have Russian cosmonauts on the station. But we blocked the Chinese. Somewhere along the way, we decided that we didn't want the Chinese in on our top secret space technology. so we blocked them a little bit like we did with Nvidia chips. And so they worked around that. And they've created an absolute relentless machine that has been, okay, but they built Tian Gong, their space station in three years.

It's been continuously operating the last four or five years. I can't remember exactly how long it's been flying. They have a plan to land tychanots, which is what they call their astronauts. On the moon by 2029 because that's the 80th anniversary of, of the revolution. And from 1940, all analyses are showing

they're just chunking away at that goal. They landed on the moon in 2020 and 2024 in the fields with the highest concentrations of Healien 3 and brought back two kilogram samples. So they're doing it. They know what's up there and they're going for the helium 3. The politics of space. Who's planting the flag in the Regolith?

How do we solve that problem before we get up there? How do we come to some kind of global agreement? Well, the answer is we do and we don't. There are two different approaches being parallel path to right now. There's the United Nations strategy, which when Russia and the US were going to go land a human on the moon and those big, you know, the first space race, and it looked like it was going to be before the decade was out according to the Kennedy speech. And so the United Nations got together very quickly and said, okay, you know what?

We're going to draft and everybody's going to sign this outer space treaty where we're not going put weapons in space. We're not going to claim any territory for either country. We're going to treat space very differently. And both the U.S. and Russia and all the other countries, which weren't at the time space fairing, signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, two years ahead of the 269 landings. Right now, the United Nations is doing exactly the same thing. They're coming up with a Space Resources Treaty for a draft as being released in 2027, two years in advance of the 29, 30 landings that everyone anticipates. So it'll have all the language about how we peacefully cohabitate and share. And then there's the rim of eternal light. I'm sure you guys

have heard on the South Hole, which has 24-hour solar, you know, and where the water is concentrated in the permanently shadowed regions of these craters like Shackleton Crater. We had a great little chat back and forth. I think it was one of our book club lives where someone chimed in on what does a pyramid look like for the dark side of the moon. I thought that was pretty fun and clever. Well, funny, that's where the Chinese landed, which, you know, they put together a relay satellite network to be able to land on the far side of the moon with a nuclear-powered rover, take the sample and go back to Earth.

Then there's the – when I mentioned the parallel path, the other path is what's being done in deep-sea bed mining. There's an analog right now happening in that the United Nations has deep-sea bed mining authority in Kingston, Jamaica, a little bit like the ITU in Geneva, where they control geostationary frequency regulation, everything else, in coordination between countries. So this deep seabed mining authority in Jamaica, you know, it's plugging away, but it doesn't come up with a framework yet.

And so, you know, a U.S. company, the metals company, just got an executive order saying, no, no, you know what, you're a U.S. company, go ahead. And that's the way we're going to do it. And so when it comes to the moon, it may look a little bit more like the gold rush in the Wild West, honestly, than Western Canada, which had RCMP officers showing up to instill order in the law. beforehand. So we're going to see which methodology takes precedence. But honestly, if you just go up there and start mining under U.S. domestic space laws, we have to rely on the space

force as the Catholic. There's no Mounties on the Moon. There's no Mounties on the Moon. But there is the Space Force. And the Chinese have their own space force. So it could get interesting.