Chinese space program

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chinese space program began not with a rocket, but with a scientist who had been locked up by the United States government for five years. Qian Xuesen, a world-class rocketry expert who had worked in America, was allowed to return to China in 1955 after years of detention during the McCarthy era. Within a year of arriving home, he submitted a proposal for a Chinese missile program. It was approved in months. A research institute was stood up with fewer than 200 staff. And from that small beginning, China built what is now one of the most active space programs on the planet.

  Today China operates over 1,300 satellites in Earth orbit, runs one of only two active space stations in the world, has landed rovers on both the near and far sides of the Moon, and placed a rover on Mars. Its Long March 5 rocket is the most powerful launch vehicle operating anywhere outside the United States. And its ambitions stretch further still: a crewed lunar landing by 2030, a permanent research station at the lunar south pole from 2031, and robotic probes aimed at Mars, Jupiter, and eventually Neptune.

  How did a country that was copying Soviet missiles in secret in the late 1950s get here? The answer involves political upheaval, superpower rivalry, a decades-long embargo, and a series of engineering bets that paid off in ways few outside China expected.

• 2. Rockets Born from Missiles

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  Two Soviet R-2 missiles arrived in China in December 1957, shipped in secret as part of a technology transfer agreement. Chinese engineers built a licensed copy and gave it the code name "1059", expecting to launch it in 1959. The Soviet Union's abrupt withdrawal of technical assistance following the Sino-Soviet split pushed that date back, but it also forced Chinese engineers to learn by doing.

  On the 5th of December 1960, they fired missile 1059 successfully. It burned alcohol and liquid oxygen, a near-perfect imitation of the Soviet original. That same rocket was later renamed Dongfeng-1. While the imitation was still in progress, engineers at the Fifth Research Academy under Qian Xuesen were already designing something entirely their own: the Dongfeng-2, the first missile built completely by China. After a failed attempt in March 1962 and hundreds of engine firing tests, DF-2 achieved its first successful launch on the 29th of June 1964 at Jiuquan.

  On the 27th of October 1966, as part of the project honored as "Two Bombs, One Satellite", an improved version called Dongfeng-2A launched and detonated a nuclear warhead at its intended target. China was demonstrating that its missiles worked at scale. The same technology that put warheads into the sky would be adapted, staged, and refined to put satellites there too.

  A critical enabler of all this work was geography, specifically an obscure government policy called the Third Front campaign. Designed to build defense industry in China's rugged interior in preparation for a potential Soviet or American invasion, the campaign funded the expansion of Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the construction of Xichang Satellite Launch Center, and the building of Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. Nearly all the aerospace work units established in the late 1960s and early 1970s grew out of Third Front projects.

• 3. The East Is Red

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  On the 24th of April 1970, a Long March 1 rocket lifted off from Jiuquan and carried a 173-kilogram satellite named Dong Fang Hong I into orbit. The name translates as "The East Is Red I", taken from a revolutionary song. It was the heaviest first satellite any nation had placed into orbit at that point. China became the fifth country to independently launch a satellite, joining the Soviet Union, the United States, France, and Japan.

  The Long March 1 that carried it was itself derived from the Dongfeng-4 missile, which China had successfully tested on the 30th of January 1970. Engineers added a specially designed solid-propellant third stage equipped with a spin-up orbital insertion mechanism. The third stage also deployed a 40-square-meter solar reflector using centrifugal force, making the satellite visible from the ground.

  Five months earlier, on the 19th of July 1964, a T-7A sounding rocket carrying eight white mice had launched successfully from Base 603 and was recovered intact. It was China's first biological spaceflight experiment. By July 1967, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had decided China should pursue human spaceflight as well. A spacecraft named Shuguang-1 was designed beginning in January 1968. Nineteen astronaut candidates were selected by the 15th of March 1971. But the program, known as Project 714, was canceled the same year due to political turmoil.

  China's second satellite, the 221-kilogram ShiJian-1 equipped with a magnetometer and cosmic-ray and X-ray detectors, launched on the 3rd of March 1971 aboard the last Long March 1 ever flown. The next step would require heavier rockets and a completely different class of mission.

• 4. Commercial Ambitions and the Intelsat Disaster

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  On the 7th of April 1990, a Long March 3 rocket carried AsiaSat 1 into geosynchronous transfer orbit with what observers described as high precision. AsiaSat 1 was a satellite with an unusual past: originally known as Westar, it had been stranded in the wrong orbit after a kick motor malfunction and then retrieved by the Space Shuttle mission STS-51-A in 1984. China's successful launch of this salvaged satellite announced its arrival in the commercial launch market.

  The first commercial contract had been signed with AsiaSat in January 1989. To take on heavier satellites that Long March 3 could not lift, China developed Long March 2E, a rocket with strap-on boosters capable of carrying up to 3,000 kilograms to geosynchronous transfer orbit. Engineers at China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology built all the hardware from scratch in 18 months, a pace that impressed American experts involved in the Optus satellite program.

  Then disaster struck. On the 15th of February 1996, Long March 3B veered off course immediately after clearing the launch platform during a flight carrying Intelsat 708. It crashed 22 seconds later, killing 6 people and injuring 57. It was the most destructive event in the history of the Chinese space program. Two more failures followed within months. Insurance costs soared, orders were canceled, and the program's commercial reputation collapsed.

  The political fallout compounded the technical damage. In 1998, the United States accused Hughes and Loral of exporting technologies that aided China's ballistic missile program. The Cox Report expanded those accusations to include allegations of stolen weapons design information. Congress subsequently placed commercial satellites under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, effectively barring any satellite containing American components from flying on Chinese rockets. The last American satellites launched by China lifted off on the 12th of June 1999 aboard a Long March 2C. China's commercial launch business stagnated for years afterward.

• 5. Yang Liwei and Project 921

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  At 6:30 on the 20th of November 1999, China Standard Time, an uncrewed Shenzhou spacecraft lifted off from Jiuquan atop a Long March 2F rocket. It orbited Earth 14 times, landed safely in Inner Mongolia, and made public for the first time a human spaceflight program that had been running in secret since its formal approval by the CCP Politburo Standing Committee on the 21st of September 1992 under the designation Project 921.

  Project 921 was organized around three steps: a crewed spacecraft launch and return, short-term space laboratory missions, and finally a long-term modular space station. From January 2001 to January 2003, three more uncrewed Shenzhou flights validated every system needed for human spaceflight. The final rehearsal, Shenzhou-4, launched on the 30th of December 2002, flew 108 orbits over 6 days and 18 hours before returning safely.

  On the 15th of October 2003, Yang Liwei climbed aboard Shenzhou-5 at Jiuquan. The Long March 2F placed him in orbit ten minutes after launch. He flew for more than 21 hours and completed 14 orbits before landing in Inner Mongolia the following morning, walking out of the return capsule under his own power. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was among those who sent endorsements. China became the third country capable of independent human spaceflight, ending a duopoly held by the Soviet Union and Russia and the United States for over 40 years.

  China's Shenzhou craft was adapted from Russia's Soyuz following a 1995 treaty, but Project 921 developed its own launch vehicle, mission control center in Beijing, and astronaut training infrastructure. Fourteen candidates formed the initial People's Liberation Army Astronaut Corps. By 2005, two astronauts, Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng, completed China's first multi-person spaceflight aboard Shenzhou-6 between the 12th and the 17th of October. In 2008, Zhai Zhigang performed China's first spacewalk during the Shenzhou-7 mission.

• 6. Going to the Moon

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  Chinese scientists began studying the feasibility of Moon exploration in 1994. Six years later, the government's first space white paper named the Moon as the primary target for deep space exploration within the decade. In January 2004, the program was formally approved and structured in three phases summarized as "Orbiting, Landing, Returning".

  Chang'e-1, the first lunar orbiter, launched on the 24th of October 2007 aboard a Long March 3A rocket and entered Moon orbit on the 7th of November. It produced China's first map of the lunar surface before performing a controlled hard landing on the 1st of March 2009, exceeding its designed life span. China's third official space milestone, after Dong Fang Hong I and the first crewed flight, was this mission.

  Chang'e-3, China's first lander, reached the Sinus Iridum region on the 14th of December 2013, making China the third country to achieve a soft landing on an extraterrestrial body. The Yutu rover deployed the following day. Then came the mission that no other space agency had attempted. Because the Moon's far side has no direct radio contact with Earth, Chang'e-4 required a relay satellite. China launched Queqiao in May 2018 to orbit the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrangian point. On the 3rd of January 2019, Chang'e-4 soft-landed in the Von Karman crater on the far side of the Moon and returned the first close-up images from that surface. Yutu-2 drove onto the far side a few hours later, leaving the first tracks ever made there. The mission team received the IAF World Space Award in 2020.

  The "Returning" phase concluded with Chang'e-5 in late 2020. The spacecraft landed near Mons Rumker in Oceanus Procellarum on the 1st of December, collected samples, and launched an ascent vehicle from the lunar surface on the 3rd of December, the first time China had launched a spacecraft from an extraterrestrial body. The ascent vehicle docked with an orbiter in lunar orbit on the 6th of December, completing the first automated rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit by any nation. The return capsule landed in Inner Mongolia on the 17th of December, carrying 1,731 grams of lunar material. Four years later, Chang'e-6 repeated this feat from the far side, landing in Apollo Basin on the 1st of June 2024 and returning samples to Inner Mongolia on the 25th of June 2024.

• 7. Tiangong and the Space Station Era

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  In 2007, China formally requested to join the International Space Station program. Roscosmos and the European Space Agency supported cooperation, but the United States rejected Chinese admission and later passed the Wolf Amendment prohibiting NASA from collaborating with Chinese entities. China's response was to build its own station.

  The path ran through two prototypes. Tiangong-1, an 8,000-kilogram target vehicle, launched in 2011. Shenzhou-8 performed China's first automatic rendezvous and docking on the 3rd of November 2011. Tiangong-1 then hosted the first manual docking with Shenzhou-9 in June 2012, a crew that included Liu Yang, China's first female astronaut. Shenzhou-10 followed, and during that mission Wang Yaping gave live science lectures to over 60 million students across China.

  Tiangong-2, the first genuine space laboratory, launched on the 15th of September 2016. Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong lived aboard it for about 30 days, breaking China's record for the longest human spaceflight mission. China's first cargo spacecraft, Tianzhou-1, docked with it in April 2017 and conducted multiple in-orbit propellant refueling tests.

  The full Tiangong station began taking shape on the 29th of April 2021 when the 22-tonne Tianhe core module launched on a Long March 5B rocket. The Wentian laboratory module, weighing 23.2 tonnes and the largest spacecraft China had ever launched, docked in July 2022. The Mengtian laboratory module, the station's third and final component, arrived on the 31st of October 2022. By the 3rd of November 2022, the T-shaped China Space Station was complete. Shenzhou-15 launched on the 29th of November 2022, and its crew of Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming, and Zhang Lu was welcomed aboard by the Shenzhou-14 crew, marking the first crew handover in Chinese spaceflight history and the start of continuous human presence on the station. Tianwen-2, launched in May 2025, is now en route to the co-orbital near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa and the active asteroid 311P/PanSTARRS.

• 8. What Comes Next

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  China's plans for the coming years are detailed and specific. A crewed lunar landing is scheduled by 2030, using the Mengzhou spacecraft, the Lanyue lander, and the Long March 10 rocket, all currently in development. Chang'e-7 will conduct a precise landing in the Moon's polar region and deploy a "hopping detector" to explore permanently shadowed craters. Chang'e-8 will follow to test in-situ resource utilization as a precursor to the International Lunar Research Station, which China plans to begin constructing at the lunar south pole from 2031 with Roscosmos and eleven other partner nations.

  For Mars, Tianwen-3 is scheduled for two launches in 2028, carrying hardware to collect and return Martian samples to Earth. Tianwen-4, planned for 2029, will send an orbiter to Jupiter's system and attach a probe for a Uranus flyby. Probes called Shensuo aim to fly by Neptune. China's deep space network, already tested during Tianwen-1's seven-month journey to Mars, will support all of these missions.

  At home, the private space sector launched more than a hundred times from 2019 onward with new rocket designs including the Kuaizhou family and Ceres-1. Reusable spacecraft are in development, among them the Zhuque-3 rocket and a clandestine spaceplane. The Xuntian Space Telescope is also planned for launch, intended to operate near the Tiangong station.

  The Beidou-3 navigation system, completed on the 31st of July 2020 when Xi Jinping declared it fully operational, is now one of four core global navigation system providers recognized by the United Nations. Its 45 satellites offer positioning, timing, short message communication, and international search and rescue capabilities worldwide. The infrastructure China has built since those first borrowed Soviet missiles suggests the pace of expansion is unlikely to slow.