In the 2013 drawer China barely appears, filed as the cautious newcomer redoing other people's 1960s firsts, and that file is now badly out of date. In 2024 China brought back the first samples ever lifted from the far side of the Moon, something no one else has managed, and because a US law locked it out of the ISS it built its own station, which may soon be the only one left in orbit. Its Mars sample-return mission has been pulled forward to 2028, early enough that the first Martian soil on Earth could arrive in a Chinese capsule. Even the thing least imaginable in 2013 now exists: a private Chinese launch industry chasing reusable rockets and two rivals to Starlink. China has not overtaken America, but it is the only one in the building closing the gap at speed, with a crewed lunar landing promised before 2030 - and on current form, the next boots on the Moon may not be American.
In June 2024 a Chinese spacecraft lifted off from the far side of the Moon carrying about two kilograms of rock and dust, and brought it home. The far side - the hemisphere that never turns to face Earth - had been landed on exactly once before, also by China, and sampled by no one. For the first time, a country had reached around the back of the Moon, picked up a piece of it, and carried it back.
Open the 2013 drawer of this archive and China is barely in it: the cautious newcomer, putting its first man in orbit in 2003, working through in slow careful steps what the Americans and Soviets had done in the 1960s. That file is badly out of date. China is the second space power on Earth and closing, the only nation with a brand-new space station, and the one most likely to put the next set of boots on the Moon.
It started quietly. The first Chinese satellite went up in 1970 broadcasting a patriotic song by radio, so the whole country could tune in and hear it pass. Yang Liwei rode a Shenzhou capsule into orbit in 2003, the third country to launch a human on its own rocket, four decades behind the Soviets and Americans but entirely under its own power. Then came the checklist, ticked off without much drama: a spacewalk, two small test labs, and in 2022 the Tiangong station, finished and permanently crewed, with a fresh three-person crew rotating through roughly every six months.
China built that station because it was made to. A 2011 US law bars NASA from cooperating with it, on the reasoning that the space program and the People's Liberation Army are one organisation wearing two hats. Shut out of the ISS, China built its own, and when the ISS is brought down around 2030, Tiangong may be the only crewed outpost left in orbit. The exclusion meant to hold China back handed it a monopoly.
The robotic record is the genuinely impressive part. China put the first lander on the lunar far side in 2019, returned the first fresh Moon rock in over forty years in 2020, then pulled off the far-side sample return in 2024. On Mars, the Zhurong rover made it the second country ever to drive across the surface. A probe called Tianwen-2 is out chasing a near-Earth asteroid to bring a chip of it home. And Tianwen-3, the mission to return rock from Mars, has been pulled forward from 2030 to 2028, which, with the American-European sample-return effort stalled and over budget, could mean the first Martian soil ever brought to Earth arrives in a Chinese capsule.
It is not flawless, whatever the official telling suggests. Late in 2025 a suspected debris strike on a docked return craft kept a Tiangong crew in orbit until a replacement ride could be arranged. The uneasy part is how rarely anything like that surfaces at all: the program is military-run and reports its own troubles on its own schedule, when it reports them.
The newest shift is the one that would have seemed least likely in 2013, when Chinese spaceflight meant the state and nothing else. China now has a private launch industry, and it is openly trying to clone SpaceX. Firms with names like LandSpace and Space Pioneer are flying reusable, methane-burning rockets and trying to land them, and one stainless-steel vehicle, the Zhuque-3, reached orbit at the end of 2025 and missed the landing by a whisker, with another go due within months. Two state-backed megaconstellations, Guowang and Qianfan, are each meant to hang more than ten thousand satellites overhead as a direct answer to Starlink. China launched 92 times in 2025, a national record, and by spring 2026 was out-launching the United States by raw count.
The gap with SpaceX is still a canyon. By early 2026 SpaceX had recovered rockets something like four hundred times, where China had managed it about once. The two giant constellations have put up under one percent of what they promise, throttled by a shortage of the very rockets meant to launch them. China is not ahead - it is the only one in the building catching up at speed.
The next few years settle a lot of it. Chang'e-7 goes hunting for water ice at the lunar south pole, Chang'e-8 will test living off whatever it finds there, and a basic Chinese-led Moon base is pencilled in for 2035. Above all there is the crewed landing, promised before 2030, with the hardware - a rocket, a crew ship, a lander - already in testing. With NASA's own return to the Moon slipping year after year, there is now a real chance the next human footprints in lunar dust are Chinese, and not American.