The two superpowers are running to the Moon again, but this time the goal is not a flag on the surface. The goal is the south pole - one narrow place where there is ice, and ice means water, fuel and air to breathe. So this time the race is for property, not for glory.

China has set a pace few expected. It launched the Tiangong station and brought back soil samples from the far side of the Moon, something no other country has repeated. Beijing announced a permanent settlement on the Moon by 2040, and Washington reacted the way anyone reacts on realising the race has already started without them.

Two different strategies, the same deadline

The Americans are leaning on the private sector. Astrobotic's „Griffin” lander is due to touch down at the south pole towards the end of 2026 - after two previous failed landing attempts by another American firm. China is going the centralised route: the Chang'e-7 mission launches this month with four coordinated robotic systems - an orbiter, a lander, a rover and a hopping vehicle - to analyse the water ice directly.

Tang Yuhua, deputy chief designer, states the motive without decoration: finding water on the Moon could significantly cut the cost and time of transporting water from Earth and enable long-term activity at a human base. Strategic adviser Patrick Besha rates the Chinese technological path as the simpler one, and the remaining obstacles as not that insurmountable.

NASA is aiming at 2028 for landing astronauts, though those deadlines have slipped more than once. Former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has already said the next people to walk on the Moon will most likely be Chinese taikonauts. The current administrator, Jared Isaacman, acknowledges China as a serious competitor but insists America will keep its promise for 2028.

The treaty that bans appropriation - and the seventy signatures that work around it

This is where the story stops being technological. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits territorial claims, but its interpretation is contested. Seventy states have signed the Artemis Accords, which allow resource extraction and the establishment of „safety zones”. China is not among them.

Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies asks the question the whole structure rests on: if you cannot appropriate it, how can you own it? Nobody has an answer, and that is exactly why everyone is hurrying - whoever stands on the ice first will write the rules for those who come later.

This is a scene the Balkans recognise without effort. The rules exist, the treaty is signed, and then the sufficiently powerful parties draw up a parallel arrangement and call it an interpretation. The only difference is that here the ground is 384,000 kilometres away, so there is nobody to protest.

Optimists point out that the Cold War also ended with the International Space Station - decades of rivalry, then a shared station. Maybe. But that station arrived after one side had lost the race, not while it was still on. The question for 2028 is not who lands first, but what gets written into the register when they come back.