if you want to make comparisons. It's impressive, but it took the US from from May 5 1961 to July 20 1969 to go from first crewed space launch to first crewed lunar landing, or 8 years 2 months 15 days.
You forget that was the height of the Cold War, the sputnik scare, the missile gap scare and moneybags had no bottoms when it came to defense spending. Apollo alone ate up like 0.5% of the total US GDP. And that's not counting the rest of NASA, the other programs, the military spending on rockets, the basic research going on, the infrastructure costs, etc. Also, another fact that doesn't get mentioned in polite circles that those were all white men, all skilled, dedicated career engineers and scientists, not the DEI scum and visa jeets infesting all levels as it is today. It was American society at its technological, cultural, industrial and economic might that had the money and the human capital to throw around. Contemporary US... doesn't.
China went from a first crewed launch on October 15 2003 to as late as 31 December 2030 for the projected crewed lunar landing date, or 23 years 2 months 16 days, or almost 3 times as long, and that will likely be delayed.
It would make them even more serious as a way. as its now its clearly obvious that they aren't running a quick minimum viable product for a publicity stunt but they are running a marathon. They are in for the long run, patiently developing skills and experience, climbing every rung of the ladder, building up their lunar satellite network, doing sample returns, etc. and see it as a strategic goal in itself. Artemis putting a nigger, a female and a canadian on the moon first is not going to scare them off the race.
It's like saying banning exporting the M1A1 Abrams to China just lead to them building their own domestic tank industry. I'm not putting any bets on the likelihood of a bootleg, late-to-the-game Russian space program outpacing or outshining the US.
We have seen this line of argument happen in so many industries already. I remember the time when China had no shipbuilding and now they have over 50% of the shipbuilding capacity of the world. I remember when the concept of a Chinese car made me laff, like, who on fucking EARTH would buy something named from "Dongfeng motors", then now Chinese EVs are cornering the market. This must have been like how boomers felt about Japanese cars. Same happened with phones already, Huawei, Xiaomi and the rest got there, they caught up. Took less than two decades to reach the Chinese era from Ericssons and Nokias and Motorolas. Thinking that this isn't going to happen to more and more industrial sectors is just corrosively copium-influenced thinking. Space is one of the few sectors where competing is still possible(mostly thanks to Musk being autistic) so as much effort and support should be going into it as possible, There is a race going on and banking on your opponent with a good track record suddenly stumbling is not a good strategy.
There's a fuckton of minerals on the moon and the asteroid belt so whoever gets to them first effectively wins the 21st century
Not just that, but the one who gets the first self-sufficient moonbase running will get an INSANE lead in exploring and colonizing the outer solar system. If they are able to repair and refuel ships in lunar orbit from fuels made from lunar soil it cuts launch costs to a fraction. It means that the planet-hopping can begin as their freighters become cheap enough to send to Mars by the dozens, making a martian colony much easier and cheaper to maintain and much more viable. If they are first to well establish themselves on the Mars, they will be in position to expand into the asteroid belt and Jovian moons behind it. Once they have the cargo system in base to mine and produce spaceships in space, then they basically won the space race, as they could fill out the entire solar system in a few decades and keep them supplied. Initial advantages just keep compounding on themselves. Not to mention the difficult to quantify but enormous value of being the first to put flags on things, once the real dividing up of space begins.
