Russia Will Restart Moon Landings, Says Putin

For the same mass to support humans for any length of time robots will get more science done. There's a 5 second delay to the moon. Or at least that was the lag on the Lunokhod rovers. So nearly live. While humans are faster and more flexible, robotic rovers can stay longer and don't life support or a way to get home. And samples have been sent home by small rockets.

840kg of 1960's tech launched on a Proton, similar payload to a Falcon 9 Full Thrust, so launch today would be as cheap as chips compared to $4Bn per SLS flight and all the other backup that NASA is doing.

But still expensive. But China has deep pockets and like the US before them (apart from SpaceX the only big engines the US has used since the shuttles RS25's are based on or are Russian designs ) will try to buy Russian tech as cheaply as possible.

Not without selling the family silver to the Chinese.

There's a lot of hard data the Russians have on space stuff that works and stuff that doesn't. Chinese spacecraft have a very obvious Soviet ancestry. A joint Chinese-Russian mission would have money flowing one way and technology going the other. And then the Chinese won't need the Russians.

Meanwhile NASA is relying on Europeans for life support and propulsion for their new moon rocket after the first two hours of the flight because spaceflight is hard and congress won't let them buy Russian tech anymore.