China publicly discloses plan for a lunar landing within three years

Chinese space officials confirmed this weekend that the Asian nation plans to land its astronauts on the Moon within three years.

At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, officials, including Wang Xiang, chief designer for the lunar exploration program, laid out the country’s most publicly detailed plans yet for a series of missions leading up to a crewed lunar landing “before 2030.”

China’s lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon.

According to slides shared on social media, the current plan involves:

- An uncrewed test of the Long March 10A rocket (a single-stick variant, with no boosters) and the Mengzhou spacecraft to low-Earth orbit. Target: early 2027

- An uncrewed test of the larger Long March 10 rocket (a core stage with two boosters) and the Lanyue lunar lander, including descent/ascent from Moon’s surface. Target: 2028

- A concurrent launch of two Long March 10 rockets, one carrying uncrewed Mengzhou and the other the Lanyue vehicle; they will dock in lunar orbit. Target: 2029

- Dual launch of Long March 10 rockets, this time with crew on the Mengzhou spacecraft, leading to crewed landing mission. Target: “Before 2030”

The public release of this new information provides a timeline for gauging China’s technical progress in its efforts to land humans on the Moon before 2030 and beat NASA and the United States back to the lunar surface.

Notably, the plan (for now, at least) omits a mission similar to Apollo 8 or Artemis II, which involved a crew flying out to the Moon and either entering orbit or passing close by before returning to Earth. The Mengzhou vehicle should still get a workout closer to Earth with humans on board as part of missions carrying astronauts to Tiangong, China’s space station in low-Earth orbit.

China’s program has been largely opaque

NASA has set a target of landing humans on the Moon by 2028, a year or so ahead of China. The United States, which has been working on the Space Launch System rocket for 15 years and the Orion spacecraft even longer, has a more established rocket and crew vehicle.