Lunar

Aug. 23 (UPI) — China’s space agency on Sunday postponed the launch of an ambitious mission to search the south pole of the moon for ice due to poor weather.

The robotic lunar probe Chang’e-7 had been slated to take off on Sunday night but failed to meet launch conditions, the China Manned Space Agency said.

The agency added an “assessment was conducted following the principle of prudence, reliability and absolute mission success,” Xinhua reported.

The main reason for the delay was poor weather due to Tropical Depression Narra in the Gulf of Tonkin, Space.com reported.

Officials had at first pushed the launch back by a day, the news outlet reported. Now, it is unclear when the launch will happen.

The Chang’e-7 mission would have been the first in history to probe ice on the moon’s south pole.

“It looks like an incredibly capable and ambitious mission with multiple scientific components on the orbiter, lander, rover and hopper,” Katherine Joy, a professor at the University of Manchester, told SpaceNews. “There is a potential for a huge science return if the mission can successfully land at its intended landing site close to Shackleton crater.”

Joy, who studies lunar and planetary science, added the mission would represent “a really important step for understanding the future human exploration potential of the south pole of the moon, and for investigating the origins of lunar volatiles.”

China is set to launch its Chang’e-7 unmanned, robotic space mission, possibly as early as Monday morning, to look for ice water in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon’s south pole.

This marks China’s seventh and most ambitious moon mission so far. Here is what we know about it.

What do we know about Chang’e-7?

The Chang’e‑7 launch window runs from Monday, August 24 to Monday, August 31, according to launch observers. That means the mission could lift off on any day in that period.

The Chang’e-7 comprises an orbiter, a lander, a rover and a hopper.

• The orbiter is the main spacecraft which will remain in the moon’s orbit, mapping the surface and taking images while the mission is under way. It will also relay data and communications between the other Chang’e‑7 components and Earth.
• The lander is the vessel that will touch down on the lunar surface, loaded with the necessary scientific instruments for lunar exploration, near the edge of the Shackleton Crater, a 21km-wide (13-mile-wide) pit close to the moon’s south pole. Lunar missions before this have never come this close to the pole.
• The rover is a small robotic vehicle which can drive around the landing site and which carries equipment to analyse the local environment, including rocks and soil.
• The hopper is a small robotic craft powered by solar energy, designed to “hop” – or fly – short distances from the surface of the moon and land again. It will be used to explore the Shackleton Crater.

How do we know there is water on the moon?

Over the past two decades, several space missions have established that there is water on the moon.

Since the 1960s, even before the first Apollo landing in 1969, scientists speculated that water could exist on the moon. However, when Apollo crews returned samples for testing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they appeared to be dry.

Finally, in 2009, NASA deliberately crashed a rocket segment and its probe into a shadowed lunar crater to analyse the dust plume it kicked up. This provided one of the clearest direct confirmations that significant ice water does exist on the moon, building on earlier detections of water and hydrogen by probes.

In October 2020, NASA scientists announced that water on the moon is more widespread than previously known. They said water molecules had been found to be encapsulated within mineral grains on the lunar surface and speculated that more water is hidden in ice patches which are in permanent shadows.

NASA describes these permanent shadows as dark areas inside deep craters near the north and south poles of the moon where sunlight has not reached for millions or even billions of years. In 2018, prior to confirming it in 2020, NASA had detected water ice in shadowed parts of the moon through mapping.

Why is it important to find out more about the water on the moon?

Expanding knowledge about water on the moon is vital because ancient polar ice may have preserved a record of lunar volcanic activity and of water delivered by comets and asteroids to the Earth-moon system, offering clues to how our own oceans originally formed.

Additionally, if there is enough water on the moon that is realistically accessible, it could serve as a source of drinking water for crewed lunar missions, and could also help to keep equipment cool.

Hydrogen could also be extracted from moon water to provide fuel, while oxygen could be extracted to breathe, supporting onward missions to Mars or lunar mining.

Could anyone ‘own’ the water on the moon?

The 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty bans any nation from claiming sovereignty over the moon or owning it as territory. It does not explicitly prohibit commercial operations, but it requires private activities in space to be authorised and supervised by states and leaves key questions about resource ownership unresolved.

Which recent space missions have searched for frozen water on the moon?

In 2023, Russia’s lunar spacecraft, Luna-25, was launched to look for frozen water in the moon’s south pole. However, the Luna-25 spun out of control and crashed. The crash prevented any scientific data collection or water discovery.

Racing against the Luna-25 mission was India’s Chandrayaan-3, which also aimed to expand knowledge of lunar water ice. Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed in August 2023 and found critical new evidence of water on the surface of the moon’s south pole through soil temperature readings.

Why is exploring the moon’s south pole a challenge?

Attempted landings at the moon’s south pole have failed before because of its challenging terrain, which is full of craters and deep trenches.

The south pole is far from the equatorial region targeted by previous missions, including the crewed Apollo landings.

What is different about the Chang’e-7 mission?

The upcoming Chang’e-7 is aiming to expand knowledge about where, exactly, water is located in the craters of the moon, how deep it is, what form it is in and whether it is indeed possible to access it.

The Chang’e-7’s six-legged hopper has been designed to jump into and out of the deep, shadowed craters near the south pole that are hard for traditional rovers to reach, to look for water ice and other resources.

No previous space mission has used a dedicated hopper to jump in and out of lunar craters in this way.

The greatest geopolitical and economic challenge facing the United States today is the proliferation of international Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs.) While the United States has the “sweet geopolitical spot in the world’s geography and topographic landmass,” its economic dominance is being challenged by the proliferation of international SWFs. It is true, at present, that the United States has the largest reserve of oil and mineral wealth in the world, yet with SWFs gaining traction in the world economy, the oil reserves and mineral wealth may not matter.

Those countries that have initiated SWFs as part of their economic and geopolitical life are on an upward trajectory. The United States, on the other hand, is on a downward path by not marshalling its vast mineral wealth in a comprehensive and dynamic SWF. If things continue on their present course, those countries utilizing their mineral wealth and excess cash surplus will eventually catch up and overtake the size of the US economy. This is an evolving threat to the national security of the United States and to its very polity.

The most immediate threat to the United States is the race to develop mining facilities on the Moon to harvest and transport the critical element of Helium-3 (He-3.)    He-3 is a critical element for the increasing economic demands of a modern world economy. Whoever can establish mining dominance for this critical element will become the world’s leading economic power in the world, regardless of that nation’s mineral wealth on Earth.

However, with its present economic and political strength, the United States has the means to reverse that trend if its two major political organizations can compromise on the very nature of the framework that establishes a United States SWF; this challenge is not easily dealt with.

This article discusses the legislative gridlock surrounding the creation of a United States SWF and the accelerating international competition that challenges the current United States dominance in space technology.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is currently constructing the SPARC at Devens, Massachusetts. CFS is constructing the SPARC to demonstrate to the world that it has solved the fusion problem. Despite some technological setbacks, CFS is on schedule to make the SPARC operational by the end of 2026, or early 2027. At the same time, CFS is currently constructing a fusion reactor (called a tokamak) in Virginia, which is scheduled to go online in the early 2030s. Critical to the ARC’s development is a shortage of the element He-3. He-3 is ignited by radio frequency and is the sparkplug that begins the plasma process, which is fusion energy, in the ARC tokamak.

The Commercial Landscape: U.S. Private Frontrunners

Terrestrial Helium-3 supply—derived primarily from nuclear stockpile maintenance—is severely capped at 22,000 to 30,000 liters annually. With surging demand for ultra-low-term quantum computer cooling, private aerospace firms are leading the transition to lunar harvesting:

• Interlune: Founded by former Blue Origin executives, the company unveiled a full-scale prototype harvester developed with Vermeer to process one hundred metric tons of regolith per hour. Backed by a $6.9 million NASA contract for its Prospect Moon payload, Interlune secured a historic $300M+ supply agreement with Finnish quantum firm Bluefors. Its first mapping payload is scheduled for an upcoming commercial lunar launch.
• Lunar Helium-3 Mining (LH3M): This firm holds five U.S. patents on a non-invasive, gas-separation architecture designed to extract solar wind volatile gases while bypassing traditional, high-wear mechanical regolith excavation.

The U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund Gridlock

While Helium-3 is valued at roughly $20 million per kilogram, the asset cannot currently be utilized to seed an American Sovereign Wealth Fund due to severe political domestic gridlock:

• The Legislative Catch-22: The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act explicitly protects private enterprise, granting corporations exclusive ownership over extracted space resources. To capture this value, Congress would need to enact “space-severance taxes” or equity-for-infrastructure deals—both of which face massive ideological pushbacks in a deeply divided legislature.  It should be noted that American taxpayers have invested some $1.9 trillion (adjusted for inflation) in technology developed by NASA. Since the American people invested this money, they should be entitled to a return on investment.
• The Deficit vs. Surplus Dilemma: Traditional SWFs rely on state-managed resource surpluses (e.g., Norway’s oil). The U.S. operates at a massive structural deficit. Republicans propose seeding a fund via tariffs or fossil-fuel extraction, while Democrats demand funding via corporate wealth taxes or clean-energy equity. These disputes, combined with immediate 2026 midterm election priorities, have stalled the SWF framework completely.

Global Geopolitical Competitors: State-Driven Alternatives

While the U.S. model depends heavily on the private market, international adversaries are leveraging unified state power to establish dominance over lunar resources:

• China (CNSA): China’s Chang’e lunar exploration program is systematically mapping Helium-3 concentrations. Unlike the U.S. focus on near-term quantum cooling, Beijing explicitly views lunar He-3 as a long-term strategic energy priority to fuel Earth-based Deuterium-Helium-3 nuclear fusion reactors.
• The China-Russia Coalition: Beijing and Moscow have formalized a binding industrial partnership to construct an automated nuclear reactor on the Moon’s South Pole by 2035–2036. This autonomous reactor is designed to resolve the “Lunar Night” problem, providing continuous power to massive, automated mining rovers and scientific labs under the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) framework.
• Japan (ispace): In the allied sector, Japanese lunar robotics firm ispace has partnered with European mining tech developers to pioneer its own automated, energy-efficient recovery models for lunar Helium-3.

·        Conclusion

·        The race for Helium-3 represents a critical shift from symbolic space exploration to deep-space industrial supply chains. While U.S. commercial tech is moving quickly, domestic policy gridlock risks ceding permanent, state-backed infrastructure dominance to the China-Russia ILRS coalition.

·        While the concept of using outer space resources to build national wealth is actively discussed by think tanks, Congress has separate, targeted pieces of legislation addressing artificial intelligence revenue, foreign transparency, and space resource exploration rules.

·         

·        The primary draft bills and legislative vehicles currently stalled in committee reveal how Congress is attempting to navigate these frameworks:

The American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act (S. 4825)

Introduced in June 2026 by Senate Finance Committee member Bernie Sanders (I-VT), this is the most direct legislative attempt to create a federal wealth fund.

• The Mechanism: The bill proposes imposing a specialized excise tax on systemically critical artificial intelligence models and automation infrastructure. The revenue would seed a citizen-owned national wealth fund.
• Why It’s Stalled: It is currently deadlocked in the Senate Finance Committee. The bill faces severe pushback from lawmakers who argue that taxing emerging domestic tech sectors will cause the U.S. to lose the AI race to China, preferring instead to seed a potential fund via tariffs or natural resources.

2. The Sovereign Wealth Fund Transparency Act (S. 1488)

Introduced by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), this bill tackles the national security and foreign policy side of state-owned investment vehicles.

• The Mechanism: Rather than creating a U.S. fund, this bill forces heavy disclosure requirements, financial auditing, and security screening on foreign sovereign wealth funds operating within U.S. critical infrastructure, high-tech, and aerospace sectors.

Why It’s Stalled: Referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, it has remained stagnant due to concerns that over-regulating allied sovereign wealth funds (such as those from Gulf state allies or Singapore) could chill necessary foreign direct investment into U.S. tech startups.

3. Space Resource Extraction & Regulatory Frameworks (CRS / Commerce Committee Review)

There is currently no singular active bill trying to place federal royalties on lunar Helium-3 mining. Instead, the debate is gridlocked during budget reconciliation and agency authorizations within the House and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committees.

• The Conflict: Congressional research reports on space resource extraction outline a widening gap in regulatory authority. NASA’s Artemis framework pushes heavily for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) via public-private partnerships. However, some factions in Congress are pushing for strict government-owned procurement models to prevent private monopolies over lunar sites, effectively freezing long-term policy development
• Midterm Postponements: Broad commercial space bills have been repeatedly delayed because committee attention is entirely consumed by urgent federal budget reconciliation battles and defense appropriations.development.

Summary of Bill Statuses

Conclusion

Until the two major political organizations can begin to compromise for the good of the American people, the United States will eventually revert to a second-class power.