Hello and welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Casey Dreyer, the host and also Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society.

This month, I am very excited to host somebody I wanted to have on the show for a long time.

Dr. Patrick Bisha was a strategic

advisor at NASA for many years. He is also the founder of the Global Space Group. He's

an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, just an overall general expert in space policy.

But his particular expertise is quite relevant these days.

He was previously the overall lead for Asia, particularly China and India, in the Office of International

and Interagency Relations at NASA.

And he has a lot of long time understanding and depth of research in China, in China space program.

And of course, Mandarin, he speaks Mandarin in the language, it's done quite an extensive amount of work in that area.

He was recently testifying before the House of Representatives in the fall of 2025 on the role

of China's space ambitions and the relative decisions that the United States should make

or not in relation to those. It's probably understating it a bit to say that China is pretty

important to overall U.S.

space policy these days.

We have seen in the last few years an increasing amount of rhetoric about China as a geopolitical

rival that must be met or matched in space capability in the United States.

And it has basically set the current schedule for Artemis

in terms of trying to land American astronauts or American allies and astronauts onto the

surface of the moon before China, which is widely expected to occur sometime around 2030,

possibly earlier, possibly later. I have a lot of broad issues with geopolitical framing, to be honest.

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