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The race for near space and cislunar space is not a scientific sideshow. It is the early stage of a new struggle over power, access, industry, and coercion. The state, or coalition of states, that first secures durable control of the space between Earth and the Moon will have earned a disproportionate advantage in determining future balances of power on this planet.

The ability to project power in the modern world already depends on infrastructure above the atmosphere. Communications, surveillance, navigation, targeting, timing systems, and military co-ordination all rely on satellites. Once a country’s prosperity and security depend on assets in orbit, space becomes critical national infrastructure.

That changes the question from whether space matters to whether a rival can blind, jam, degrade, or out position you there.

For that reason, the first contest is not for the Moon itself. It is for near space, especially low-Earth orbit and the wider orbital environment around the planet. Whoever secures that belt first secures the platform from which all wider ambitions flow. A state that dominates near space enjoys a decisive advantage in seeing, communicating, moving, and organising. It also gains the ability to deny others the same freedom. The struggle for cislunar space (the space between Earth and the Moon) therefore begins much closer to Earth than many assume.

This is not theory. The United States (US) Department of War explicitly calls space a warfighting domain. American, Chinese, and Russian planners all understand that modern military power is inseparable from orbital systems. Space-based assets are now so central that conflict there would spill rapidly down onto Earth. A war in space would not stay in space. It would hit finance, logistics, communications, navigation, and defence almost immediately.

Cislunar space is not just empty transit. It is the corridor through which future lunar access, industrial development, resource use, and wider solar system operations must pass. The first serious mover there will not simply travel through it. It will begin to organise it. That means building the launch architecture, orbital support systems, relay networks, staging points, and safety regimes that others will later have to use, contest, or accept.

The Moon then becomes more than a destination. It becomes strategic ground. The issue is not science fiction, nor flags, nor televised symbolism. It is that the Moon combines proximity, physical utility, and political value. It is close enough to matter now, difficult enough to remain exclusive, and rich enough in possible future value to attract state competition. Water ice, fuel production, shielding, construction materials, and the possibility of building outward from the lunar environment are strategic pull factors that make the Moon a vital staging post. Once that happens, the first state to establish sustained access begins setting the pattern for everyone else.

The critical point is that first arrival matters because the law in space is very weak and whichever nation establishes a permanent presence on the Moon first will be in a strong position to shape future laws governing space.

The first space treaties were written for the first space age, when the main fear was nuclear weapons in orbit. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty said space should be open to all, that no country could own the Moon, or other celestial bodies, and that weapons of mass destruction could not be placed in orbit, or stationed in space. Later agreements dealt with rescuing astronauts, liability for damage, registering space objects, and in the 1979 Moon Agreement (a treaty governing human activity on the Moon), the idea that lunar resources should be governed for the benefit of all.

The trouble is that these rules were written before reusable rockets, private space firms, and real plans for mining and permanent infrastructure in space. So, while the old treaties still matter in principle, they do not clearly answer the hardest modern questions, such as who gets to extract resources, how far a “safety zone” around equipment can extend, or what practical control looks like short of formal sovereignty. That is why they mean less now than people think. The broad rules still exist, but the real contest is shifting towards whoever gets there first, and creates the rules that everyone else must then work around.

There is also a hard economic logic behind this. The first power to entrench itself across near space and cislunar space will enjoy first-mover advantages in the future space economy. That includes transport services, lunar logistics, orbital manufacturing, resource processing, communications architecture, and the standards by which all of this is governed. The race is therefore not just military, and not just legal, but it is also industrial. Whoever gets the infrastructure right first could come to dominate the value chains that follow.

That in turn means the contest will not be purely national in the old sense. States will still dominate, but they will act through private firms, joint ventures, and alliance systems. The US already understands this. So does China. Washington is trying to build a broad framework around lunar return, commercial launch, and allied participation. Beijing is working to ensure that it does not arrive second and find itself operating inside another power’s architecture.

That is why the race matters now. Once a rival power has secured the orbital layer above Earth, built outward through cislunar space, normalised its own rules, and created physical dependencies around its infrastructure, catching up becomes far more expensive than leading in the first place. The strategic question is therefore not whether space will matter. It is whether America, or China, reaches the point of durable control first.

The first power to secure near space will shape military advantage on Earth. The first power to lock in cislunar space will shape industrial advantage beyond it. And the first power to fuse the two will begin writing the astropolitical playbook (astropolitics is the study of how space affects politics) for the century.