Sean Daffy, Director-General of the National Aerospace Agency (NASA), recently announced that the U.S. will conduct the Alchemist-2 manned lunar mission in February 2026, which will take 10 days, with four astronauts arriving on the moon's orbit and flying for 3 hours, which will be the last time since the Apollo program that humans have been away from the moon's surface. If this mission is successfully completed, the U.S. is expected to carry out the Alchemist-3 manned lunar mission in mid-2027. Daffy also said that NASA has selected 10 astronauts from more than 8,000 applicants, who will learn from the lunar mission and may become the first American astronauts to land on Mars.

At present, the "Arsenal 2" eight words are not left behind, 3 is still far away, NASA has already selected the astronauts to land on Mars, which is not too hasty. there are U.S. media pointed out that NASA's anxiety is likely to be related to the shortage of funding, influenced by the Trump administration's "open source" policy, NASA's budget in the financial year of 2026 is only $188 billion, compared to the fiscal year of 2025 reduced by 25%, recording the largest cuts in NASA's history, almost half of the scientific mission faces the end, many already launched spacecraft and already built observatory projects have been forced to abandon, only the cost of manned moon landing and manned landing on Mars these two projects have increased.

The reason why Trump is willing to give money to these two projects is mainly because China has announced that it will realize manned landing on the moon before 2030, which greatly stimulates Trump's sensitive self-esteem. NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy seized this point and constantly hyped that China and the United States are engaged in a "space race". He said in early September that if the Artemis plan is blocked and China is allowed to land on the moon first, then the United States will It is equivalent to "surrendering the moon to China." The United States won't let this happen. "We want to defeat China on the moon, we want to be faster than China, and we have to do things well." On September 22, after China released a video of the Type 3 carrier-based aircraft ejecting and taking off from the Fujian aircraft carrier, Sean Duffy took the opportunity to hype it. He said at the press conference introducing the new astronauts, "If China defeats NASA, then I'm really damned."

In less than a month, Sean Duffy talked about China twice in a row. Is this really necessary? It is pointed out that Sean Duffy seems to lack confidence in the moon landing plan. For example, in his speech to all NASA employees, he emphasized that safety should not be allowed to become an obstacle to progress. Safety should be taken seriously, but we should not choose to do nothing for the sake of safety. While taking into account safety, we should dare to take some risks and make a leap in innovation. This shows that the existing lunar landing technology solution may have certain technical risks. Unlike the Apollo plan to send the entire lunar landing spacecraft directly to the moon at one time, the Artemis plan uses a segmented transportation method, which requires two launches of manned spacecraft and lunar lander, each going to orbit around the moon and completing on-orbit docking. Although this can reduce the rocket's capacity cost, the risk of docking is greatly increased. If the docking is unsuccessful, not only will the mission fail, but the life safety of astronauts may be threatened.

But the problem is that the military order to complete the lunar mission before Trump's departure has been put in place, and if you want to return to the moon in the case of insufficient funds and insufficient technological maturity, you can only take the risk of trying. To know that recently China's "Practice 21" and "Practice 25" satellites, have carried out an unprecedented on orbit fuel and large-scale orbital movements in the Earth synchronous orbit, causing U.S. attention. This is not only important in military terms, but also a solid technical basis for manned moon landing. If the United States does not accelerate the progress, then China is really likely to rob in front of the United States and complete the manned moon landing plan, which is absolutely unaccep