The China National Space Administration (CNSA) is the government agency that directs China's civil space policy, runs its robotic exploration programs, and represents China in international space cooperation.[1] Established in 1993,[1] CNSA manages the Chang'e lunar missions, which returned the first samples from the Moon's far side in 2024,[8] and the Tianwen planetary missions; China aims to follow with a crewed lunar landing before 2030.[27]

China's space effort is distributed across several institutions: CNSA sets policy and runs robotic exploration, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) operates the Tiangong space station and the Shenzhou crew flights, and the state-owned contractor CASC builds most spacecraft and the Long March rocket family.[4] Shan Zhongde was appointed CNSA administrator in January 2025, succeeding Zhang Kejian in a leadership change that ran through the agency's defense-industry parent.[2][3] Together these institutions have made China the second most active spacefaring nation; its 92 orbital launches in 2025 trailed only the United States.[5] Landmark results in the 2020s include lunar sample returns from both sides of the Moon, a first-attempt Mars landing, and a permanently crewed station.

Status as of August 2026

By August 10, 2026, China had made 56 orbital launch attempts for the year, and the last of them failed: a Long March 7A broke apart about 85 seconds after liftoff from Wenchang, destroying the Zhongxing-4B communications satellite in the country's fourth launch failure of 2026.[31] Chang'e 7, CNSA's lunar south pole landing mission, is stacked at the same spaceport on a Long March 5 scheduled to lift off on August 24, and that rocket's core stage and boosters use the same YF-100 engines as the failed vehicle.[31] Tianwen-2 has been surveying the asteroid Kamo'oalewa from about 20 kilometers away since July 6, ahead of a sampling attempt.[15] In the crewed lunar program, the Long March 10B reached orbit on July 10 and set its first stage down on a net-equipped sea platform,[30] and officials have targeted late 2026 for the first orbital flight of the crew-rated Long March 10A carrying an uncrewed Mengzhou capsule.[27]

Chang'e lunar program

The Chang'e program, named for the Chinese Moon goddess, has advanced in deliberate steps from orbiters to landers to sample returns. Chang'e 4 made the first landing on the lunar far side in January 2019, delivering the Yutu-2 rover to Von Kármán crater.[6] Chang'e 5 returned 1,731 grams of near side material in December 2020, China's first sample return.[7] Chang'e 6 repeated the feat where no one had: it landed in Apollo crater, inside the far side's South Pole-Aitken basin, and delivered 1,935.3 grams to Earth on June 25, 2024, the first samples ever collected from the Moon's hidden hemisphere.[8][9]

MissionYearResult
Chang'e 42019First soft landing on the lunar far side
Chang'e 52020Returned 1,731 g of near side samples
Chang'e 62024Returned 1,935.3 g, first far side samples
Chang'e 7H2 2026 (planned)South pole orbiter, lander, rover, and hopper
Chang'e 8~2028-2029 (planned)Resource utilization tests for a lunar base

Chang'e 7 is next. The multi-spacecraft mission arrived at the Wenchang launch site in April 2026 for a planned liftoff on a Long March 5 in the second half of the year, a schedule officials reaffirmed that May.[10][11] It combines an orbiter, a lander targeting the illuminated rim of Shackleton crater near the lunar south pole, a rover, and a hopping probe designed to fly into permanently shadowed craters in search of water ice.[10] Far side operations depend on the Queqiao relay satellites CNSA stations beyond the Moon; Queqiao-2 launched in March 2024 to support Chang'e 6 and later missions.[12] The program also carries growing international cargo: Chang'e 6 hosted four foreign payloads, a French radon detector, a Swedish-built negative ion instrument flown with the European Space Agency, an Italian laser retroreflector, and a Pakistani cubesat.[12]

Chang'e 8, planned for 2028 or 2029, will land on the Leibnitz Beta plateau (Mons Mouton) near the south pole and test technologies for living off local material, including 3D printing bricks from lunar soil. CNSA selected ten international projects for the mission in April 2025, drawn from 11 countries and regions plus one international organization, among them a Hong Kong-led operations robot and a Pakistani rover.[13] Chang'e 7 and Chang'e 8 are precursors to the International Lunar Research Station, a base concept China is developing with Roscosmos and other partners for the 2030s.[13]

Tianwen planetary missions

Tianwen-1, launched in July 2020, made China the first country to succeed with an orbiter, lander, and rover on its first independent Mars attempt. The Zhurong rover drove across Utopia Planitia from May 2021 until entering hibernation a year later; it never woke, and orbiter images published in February 2023 showed it had not moved, with dust piled on its solar panels the likely cause.[14]

Tianwen-2 launched in May 2025 to collect samples from the small near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa. After a 400-day cruise covering roughly a billion kilometers, the probe pulled up 20 kilometers from the asteroid on July 6, 2026, and began surveying its shape, composition, and structure ahead of a sampling attempt. It is scheduled to depart in April 2027 and release its sample capsule during an Earth flyby that November, then continue on to comet 311P.[15]

Tianwen-3, a Mars sample return campaign, is planned to launch on two Long March 5 rockets in 2028 and aims to bring at least 500 grams of Martian rock and soil to Earth in 2031, potentially ahead of the long-delayed NASA-ESA equivalent. The lander is designed to scoop surface material, drill up to two meters down, and dispatch a small drone to grab samples from within about 100 meters of the landing site. The scientific target is evidence of past life: organic molecules, isotopic signatures of biology, or fossil traces of microbes.[16]

Tiangong and human spaceflight

The Tiangong station, assembled in 2021-2022 from the Tianhe, Wentian, and Mengtian modules, hosts rotating three-person crews launched on Shenzhou spacecraft from Jiuquan. China built the station after being excluded from the International Space Station partnership by US law.

Tiangong handled its first major emergency in late 2025. Hours before the Shenzhou 20 crew was due to fly home on November 5, engineers found cracks in a window of their docked capsule, attributed to a suspected debris strike. The crew returned on November 14 aboard the newer Shenzhou 21 spacecraft instead, and an uncrewed Shenzhou 22 was launched on November 25, 2025, six months early, to restore a return vehicle for the station's remaining crew.[17] The damaged Shenzhou 20 was landed empty, carrying only cargo, in January 2026.[18]

Operations have since resumed their rhythm. Shenzhou 23 launched on May 24, 2026, carrying commander Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Li Jiaying, the first astronaut from Hong Kong; one crew member is slated to stay a full year, a Chinese record, and the crew is running more than 100 new experiments, from zebrafish and rice cultivation studies to materials research.[19] The outgoing Shenzhou 21 crew handed over and returned on May 29, 2026 in the borrowed Shenzhou 22 capsule, closing out the debris episode after 210 days aloft.[20]

The station is also preparing for its first foreign visitor. Under a February 2025 agreement, two Pakistani pilots were selected for astronaut training in China, and one of them is expected to fly to Tiangong as a payload specialist on a short mission around October or November 2026.[21][22]

Long March rockets

Nearly all Chinese government missions fly on Long March rockets, a family in service since 1970. The series logged its 600th flight in October 2025, when a Long March 8A lofted internet satellites, and has flown more than 86 percent of the country's launch missions.[23] The heavy-lift Long March 5 carries lunar and planetary missions from Wenchang, the Long March 2F flies crews, and newer models such as the Long March 8A serve the country's growing satellite constellations.

The cadence keeps rising. China's 92 launches in 2025 set a national record,[5] and reports in early 2026 pointed to a target of as many as 140 for the year, driven largely by two broadband mega-constellations: Guowang, a state-backed network filed with the International Telecommunication Union at some 13,000 satellites, and the Shanghai-backed Qianfan, also called Thousand Sails. By April 2026 Guowang had 168 operational satellites in orbit and Qianfan 126.[24] Commercial developers are chasing reusable rockets alongside the state program: LandSpace's methane-fueled Zhuque-3 reached orbit on its December 2025 debut, though the booster was destroyed during China's first orbital-launch landing attempt, and the company says it will fly further recovery tests and attempt to reuse a booster before the end of 2026.[25][26]

Crewed lunar goal

China has committed to landing astronauts on the Moon before 2030, a timeline that now frames the rivalry with the American Artemis program. The architecture uses two launches of the new Long March 10 rocket, one carrying the Mengzhou crew spacecraft and the other the Lanyue lander, which dock in lunar orbit. Major tests accumulated through 2025: an integrated landing and ascent test of a Lanyue test article in August, and static firings of the Long March 10 first stage at Wenchang in August and September.[27]

The crewed lunar program's pace picked up in 2026. On February 11, a Long March 10 test article made the family's first powered flight from Wenchang while the Mengzhou capsule it carried flew China's first maximum dynamic pressure abort test; CMSA reported that both performed as designed.[28][29] On July 10, the Long March 10B, a single-core commercial variant of the lunar rocket, reached orbit on its first flight and set its booster down on a net-equipped sea platform, the first stage recovery from an orbital launch by any Chinese rocket, and CASC plans to fly the recovered stage again before the end of 2026.[30] The crew-rated Long March 10A's first orbital flight, carrying an uncrewed Mengzhou, remains targeted for late 2026, with uncrewed lunar rehearsals to follow before a crewed landing attempt by 2030.[27]

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