If the Cold War space race had Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” as its capstone, the next space race is shaping up to have a body count. In a frantic scramble to beat China back to the Moon, NASA is caught between a shredded budget, brain-drained workforce, and a leadership that seems to think “safety” is a hindrance rather than a vital pillar of any space mission.At the center of this lunar mission is Sean Duffy, former reality show contestant and—unsurprisingly, given the administration he works for—the now acting NASA Administrator and—somehow also—the U.S. Secretary of Transportation.Phew! That’s a lot of important jobs for one man who is unqualified for any of them.In a recent town hall, Duffy warned employees that “sometimes we can let safety be the enemy of making progress.”That quote can read optimistically, as if to imply that it’s okay to let safety be the enemy of progress sometimes because it means we’re still moving forward, blazing new trails into the future, while being responsible about it and making sure we’re not treating the people forging that progress like disposable worker ants.What Duffy actually meant is the opposite (or so it seems). He meant to imply that the slowing down of progress in the name of safety is a bad thing and that sometimes people need to get hurt by a process or system for us to move forward, or to win a meaningless space race with the country many of us are not convinced is as much of an adversary as our government wants us to believe.If that’s what you meant to say, Sean, which it sure seems like it, then you get in that space capsule and you take that dangerous spaceflight yourself.What Republicans like Sean really mean is that you are to be sacrificed for their greater glory. Dorky desk jockeys like Duffy, like Trump, but anybody up and down this administration are all these little men brimming with false bravado but want to be seen as big, strong, tough men. The way they do it is by taking credit for everyone else’s sacrifice but blaming everyone else if it goes wrong.NASA is underfunded, understaffed, and under immense political pressure to win a global space race no one’s paying attention to because no one gives a shit. Since Trump’s second term began, NASA has lost nearly 4,000 employees to resignation offers. Budget proposals threaten to slash science funding in half. Artemis—the Moonshot 2.0—has ballooned into a bloated, delay-prone mess, with its key systems still struggling to work as advertised.Meanwhile, China is testing lunar landers, prepping next-gen rockets, and laying groundwork for a manned Moon landing by 2030. They’re even planning a lunar nuclear power station with Russia, which I’m still not fully convinced is anything more than a modern version of retro futurist 1950s space-age propaganda, but we’ll see.Public attention doesn’t rally around space like it used to, not since NASA came under attack from Republicans and dickheads like Elon swooped in to take its place in the public eye. Problematic tech bro man-children are not inspirational and not worth cheering.I assume plenty of Americans still support the exploration and study of space, and view NASA quite favorably as a wing of the government dedicated to a better understanding of our place in the universe, but those feel like lofty pursuits when we’ve got bigger problems down here that we are nowhere close to solving.Before we break off a chunk of ourselves to form a moon colony, maybe we should figure out how to make an Earthly society that can function at a basic level first and then transfer that better version of society onto a space colony.Criticize China all you want, but at least they have a near-universal healthcare system. That alone gives them plenty of reason to start looking to the stars. Meanwhile, here in the United States, we’re still adjusting to the sunlight after leaving our caves. The fact that the head of NASA seems to be okay with some astronauts dying as we race to beat China to the moon means we’re still too barbaric to deserve it. The post NASA Is in a Race to the Moon and Might Be Willing to Risk Astronauts to Win appeared first on VICE.