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In space, China's performance these days (whether measured by launches or satellites put in orbit or upmass) beats out the entire rest of the world (excepting SpaceX) combined. SpaceX outdoes them by somewhere between 200% and 900% depending on how you measure, though whether that means "the West is fine" or just "the West got really lucky" is less quantifiable. China's shooting for their first manned lunar landing around 2030, which doesn't seem likely but does seem possible; if Blue Origin continues to move glacially (though they've reached orbit now, good for them) and if Starship continues to have teething problems (the v2 ships have been tragedies so far, though catching two boosters and reusing one already was impressive) then China might beat Artemis 3 (still supposedly 2027? that is not going to happen).
China's current lunar plans are basically Apollo-style "flag and footprints" missions, vs US designs that ought to be more sustainably affordable and carry more cargo (or "much more", if Starship gets working smoothly), but China has 3 companies with Falcon-9-scale partially reusable launch vehicles currently in testing, which puts them way ahead of most of the competition. China's Starship-scale fully reusable plans are currently at the "Powerpoint slides of what we say we'll do in the 2030s" stage, so may never happen, but even that feels like a step up from e.g. the UK (current motto: "The sun will never stop setting on the British Empire") or continental Europe (also armed with 2030s-target Powerpoint slides, but for a mere Falcon 9 competitor).
Starlink is up to 6 million subscribers now, so even if Elon's irrevocably pissed off both parties at this point they've still got enough non-federal revenue to keep going. If he goes full Howard Hughes and starts trying to redesign Starship from birch or something then all bets are off, of course.
Their next Starship flight test (scrubbed yesterday with a ground systems issue) is going to be attempted this evening. No exciting booster catch attempt this time (this flight and the last are trying different angle-of-attack flyback trajectories, to get data and push out the envelope on that, and they don't want to come back near the tower in case they push too far), but it should still be tense. Everybody's waiting on pins and needles to see whether they've fixed the last of the new v2 ship problems or whether Turks and Caicos are about to get another unintended fireworks show.
The difference is that China still believes it’s good and that it is capable and has a right to do things and claim the benefits of having done them. The West probably at least since the 1950s has been browbeaten into being a henpecked househusband hoping that by acting weak it can appease everyone else. Until the West believes in itself like China does, expect no large scale projects.
…hold on. Are you an American?
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Hang on, don't tar all the West with that brush. The US actually behaves like an agentic superpower, even if it can be a senile one. The rest of the Anglosphere or Europe? You have a point.
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