On May 28, China launched Tianwen-2, a robotic mission that aims to land on a tumbling near-Earth asteroid barely the size of a conference room, extract samples and send them back to Earth.
Yet, the actual spacecraft remains publicly shrouded in mystery and international cooperation on the mission is limited. For most space agencies, this would be a once-in-a-generation challenge. For China, it is now just another step, the latest in a sweeping, state-driven campaign to become a dominant global space power.
Over the past decade of quiet, long-term strategic planning, China has emerged as the world’s second-leading space power, behind only the United States.
“As a full-fledged space power, China, by default, has a holistic approach to space activities, an approach characterized by a simultaneous and deep integration of all types of drivers, including national power projection — both hard and soft — foreign policy, national defense, innovation-driven economic growth and societal benefits such as national pride and cohesion,” said Tomas Hrozensky, senior researcher and lead on European engagement at the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna, Austria.
These policies may now alter the global space sector, where the U.S. and American companies have enjoyed a broadly-assumed, largely unchallenged leadership in space for years. Now, with China’s burst of activity following years of buildup and preparations, comes a shift in the balance of power between nations, and a growing international schism between differing views for leadership, views and norms in space. Over the next few years China expects to achieve space firsts and forge new partnerships, and, if events go as planned, even set the agenda for space exploration.
Moon landing in sight
A decade ago, a mission like Tianwen-2 would have been hard to imagine, as China still relied on aging hypergolic rockets and state-owned giants, with limited space infrastructure of its own. But in recent years, China’s achievements in and ambitions for space have grown dramatically, often following a step-by-step, methodical approach.
Since 2019, China has made the first landing on the far side of the moon, collected samples robotically from both near and far sides, completed its own answer to GPS in the Beidou system, landed a rover on Mars, constructed a modular space station that’s hosted a regular cadence of crews and science experiments and has fostered an energetic, if inchoate, commercial sector. This follows a decade which included delays to its first cryogenic launchers and space station project, with many outsiders viewing China focused more on prestige than as a serious space contender.
But the country’s agenda for the coming years is even more ambitious, at a time when NASA is facing deep cuts, cancellation of missions and potential loss of momentum and vision.
Perhaps most notable is China’s goal of putting a pair of astronauts on the moon by 2030 — an achievement that would match the U.S.’s singular feat in human spaceflight. The country recently held a pad abort test for its new deep space crew spacecraft, and is progressing on the new Long March 10 rocket — which builds on the Long March 5 — and related infrastructure for launch.
Its path to the moon, though opaque to the outside world, appears on track.
Meanwhile, the timeline for Artemis 3, NASA’s own mission to return humans to the moon, is uncertain, with SpaceX’s Starship — its Human Lander System required for the landing — suffering a series of setbacks including four consecutive explosions so far in 2025.
Engineering a strategic space roadmap
The crewed landing mission is now within reach because of a deliberate, decades-long strategy. The country’s Chang’e moon missions from the late 2000s onwards, built from orbiters to landers to sample return, with the latter being perceived as a compact test-run for getting astronauts onto the moon and back home.
China’s missions have been bold but also unusually engineering-led, said planetary scientist Patrick Michel, a senior researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Missions involve high technical risk, minimal early scientific input and little transparency.
“They are super proactive in making risky decisions compared to what we do at ESA or NASA,” Michel said. “It’s more engineering driven than science driven. Scientists come at the very end … They are data users, not mission architects.”
This model has allowed China to catch up with or leapfrog more cautious agencies by demonstrating technological maturity quickly, even if it comes at the cost of openness or a more traditional science-first mission design.
Meanwhile, its human spaceflight program, approved in 1992, eventually led to the completion of the Tiangong space station in 2022. This and the robotic lunar program are now converging to allow China’s own moonshot.
The crewed landing will be a short-term mission, reminiscent of Apollo, but is part of a sustained vision of lunar exploration. The country is planning an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), to be constructed in the early 2030s. Precursor Chang’e missions, scheduled for 2026 and 2028, seek to survey resources, especially water, at the lunar south pole, and test printing bricks from lunar regolith.
China also plans to place communications, navigation and remote sensing satellites in orbit around the moon, known as the Queqiao constellation, to support ILRS while establishing itself as a provider of space infrastructure for other countries, a leader in space and a setter of standards. This lunar stage would be followed by a wider solar system-level constellation from 2040 onwards.
Space officials have been advocating to the Chinese political powers for seizing this unique and fleeting opportunity to be the provider of lunar infrastructure.
To date, no other country has assembled as comprehensive of a cislunar plan.
Mars, and beyond
China also has an extended vision for the Red Planet.
China’s Mars sample return mission, Tianwen-3, is scheduled to launch via two Long March 5 rockets in late 2028, aiming to return to Earth in 2031 with the first-ever material collected from the Red Planet. NASA’s own mission, in collaboration with Europe, has been hit by delays and vast cost overruns and faces cancellation under the Trump administration.
While China’s Mars Sample Return mission promises a greater scientific return on paper, NASA’s mission is less definitive. Beyond samples, China envisions, in the long term, a Martian version of the lunar ILRS by around 2050, with its Queqiao constellation spanning the solar system. While these projects are years away in terms of deadline and details are few, China’s step-by-step, capability-building approach — such as deciding and committing to building a space station in 1992 with very limited resources and delivering 30 years later — makes a case for taking them seriously.
China also plans to lead exploration of the inner solar system, with missions that include Hubble-class space telescopes, a Venus atmosphere sample return, a solar polar orbiter and then looking beyond Earth’s neighborhood with exoplanet and exomoon-hunting space telescopes. It is developing nuclear power solutions for deep space, potentially allowing a proposed Neptune orbiter in the 2040s, and also getting serious about planetary defense.
The final stage of its mid and long-term plan for space science, published in fall 2024, aims to see China lead global advancement in space science by 2050, attracting top international scientists and their teams, establishing the country as one of the hubs of the global space science community, and symbolizing its status as a strong, modern socialist country.
China also has corresponding space transportation roadmaps which emphasize a transition to fully reusable launchers and long-term plans for nuclear propulsion which seek to make it the leading space power by mid-century.
State-driven commercial sector
One path to making these plans come to life is the commercial space sector.
The U.S. has long maintained leadership in space through its partnerships with industry but China is making a concerted effort to boost its national objectives by fostering commercial growth outside of its state-owned operations. At press time, three companies had performed or were preparing for static fire tests of first stages for launchers aiming to provide Falcon 9-type launch capabilities, with many others forging ahead with their own plans, with satellite firms working on constellation plans.
This momentum is backed by strong political support for China’s national plans and a young base of talent, and is being crystalized by a number of long-term policies, visions and roadmaps. Much of this effort is for more than simply space prowess, seeking also to boost growth and innovation.
“China is currently providing both strong policy and funding and infrastructure access to private aerospace firms,” said Ian Christensen, director of private sector programs at the Secure World Foundation. He noted both central government level and provincial level support for space.
“It sees commercial space as a source of innovation and growth, in particular in terms of advancing the supply chain and innovative technology that would support national level projects. More broadly, China’s central government sees having a robust space sector as a part of what it means to be a leading power on the world stage in the modern area,” Christensen said.
But there are challenges and contradictions to this approach. Christensen said it is an open question of whether this infrastructure and early-stage funding will lead to sustained business success for China’s commercial space firms.
“It is less clear that the government is willing to purchase services from the commercial space firms in China, as the state-owned enterprises continue to receive preference in contracts. And the commercial aerospace firms often report challenges in getting contracts from the government,” he said.
Christensen added that Chinese commercial space firms report muddy regulatory frameworks and difficult administrative processes.
While there are a wide range of activities, from a business model standpoint, it is unclear how much of this activity will be sustained by services and purchases from the government and other domestic institutional markets in China.
“Commercial space firms, although building this, remain behind the U.S., Europe and perhaps India, in international business. This is, of course, further challenged by market access factors and technology transfer limitations,” Christensen said.
So, while ambitions soar, internal contradictions, geopolitical resistance and international challenges could be limiting factors — not just in the commercial realm, but across the scope of its activities.
Global partnerships or continued isolation?
So what should the world — and more specifically, international governments and space agencies — make of these plans?
China’s rise has, in many ways, altered the international space landscape, bringing about a bifurcated ecosystem. It has seen the creation of competing and largely separate Artemis and ILRS visions and camps. The U.S. has been keen to prevent its technologies being used by China, which, in response, is looking to build its own tech ecosystem by working with countries such as Egypt to build its capabilities and grow a future partner.
As China presses forward with grand ambitions, the U.S. appears to be retrenching. Along with cuts to Mars Sample Return, a 2026 budget proposal under the Trump administration suggests canceling or scaling back several key NASA and ESA-linked projects — from the lunar Gateway to gravitational wave and Venus observatories. ESA is now weighing its options in response.
“One particular implication is the impact of China’s continuous growth on international cooperation. From a European standpoint, a key outstanding question relates to its engagement strategy with China,” Hrozensky said.
Partnering with China remains politically challenging, but there is a possibility of the international landscape shifting.
Despite its overt openness to cooperation, Michel said that China does not, generally, commit to international partnerships at stages critical to the mission or program. So far, most collaboration has included international payloads joining already approved and progressing missions. A Pakistani astronaut will become the first foreign visitor to the Tiangong space station, and will do so after training by China’s human spaceflight agency and taking a flight on a Chinese spacecraft.
China and Russia are reported to be working on a nuclear power solution for the ILRS, which will face frigid, fortnight-long lunar nights, illustrating how a partner can help fill a technology gap in China’s plans. However, there are few countries offering opportunities for peer-level cooperation to China.
“One particular issue that could be highlighted is reaching a critical mass in winning customers outside the G77 community and in attracting international partnerships for ILRS and exploration at large,” said Hrozensky, who also noted continuous growth of Artemis signatories, and an environment, including governance, that is more attuned to Chinese rather than U.S. interests.
“China’s narratives have lower grip at [the] international level and China faces a growing degree of mistrust among previously important partners like Europeans,” Hrozensky said.
Apart from Russia, China has attracted countries with modest space sectors to the ILRS banner, such as Venezuela, Belarus, Pakistan and South Africa, underscoring its limited pull among traditional space powers. The involvement of Russia all but precludes serious European involvement in ILRS, while, as of May, there were 55 signatories to the Artemis Accords.
It makes for tangled relationships but Hrozensky sees more binary choices on the horizon.
“A key question is, at what point in the future, space will become for China ‘the next Taiwan,’ that is, an area where it will not compromise the pursuit of a declared objective?”
This article first appeared in the July 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.