The race to the moon is back — NASA needs to get serious to beat the Chinese

Just before my final, 2001 shuttle mission to help build the International Space Station, I asked the NASA chief of human spaceflight when he thought we’d return to the moon. "Oh, probably not until 2010," he answered. I was floored — how could it possibly take that long to jump from the shuttle and ISS to the moon? After all, we’d landed there six times between 1969 and 1972.

NASA’s efforts to return to the moon, home to valuable space resources, have been repeatedly stalled by shifting space policies and failures in leadership.