This year could mark a space-race tipping point. Here’s what to know about China’s secretive program

(CNN) — A gravity-defying competition that brewed in the background of geopolitics for decades is now roaring to the forefront — with China demonstrating rapid advances in space technology and the United States ratcheting up rhetoric about a looming battle for control of the cosmos.

In the past five years alone, China has launched Tiangong, a modern orbital laboratory to rival the aging, US-led International Space Station. China also retrieved the first-ever soil samples from the far side of the moon, a feat no other nation has duplicated.

But it’s the fact that China plans to build a permanent settlement on the moon by 2040 that has prompted an urgent response from lawmakers on Capitol Hill. They’ve declared a new space race, and NASA is pledging to build a lunar outpost of America’s own. Adding to the tension is the fact that aerospace development in China is largely shrouded in secrecy, making it tough to say with absolute certainty which country is ahead in the contest. There are, however, a few clues.

And this year could mark a dramatic turning point as the moon’s south pole becomes more of a focal point for both nations.

The region is already the linchpin for US and Chinese ambitions because scientists believe it to be home to water ice. This crucial in-space resource can be converted into rocket fuel, breathable air or drinking water — all vital to sustaining an extraterrestrial settlement.

Both the United States and China plan to send robotic explorers to the south pole later this year, paving the way for human explorers to follow close behind.

The US is relying on the private sector to develop and build low-cost, exploratory robotic landers. The nation is next planning to deliver a lander called Griffin, developed by Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic Technology, to the lunar south pole in late 2026. The NASA-funded mission will aim to improve on the performance of two prior landers, built by another US company, that tripped while attempting to land on the south pole’s notoriously treacherous terrain.

Meanwhile, China is aiming to launch its robotic Chang’e-7 mission as soon as this month.

The complex endeavor will seek to use four different robotic vehicles — an orbiter, lander, rover and mobile “hopper” — working in tandem to attempt to gather unprecedented data. The effort will include tools to drill for and directly analyze water ice, a feat that the US will only attempt with robotic missions slated for next year at the earliest.

“If lunar water ice is successfully located, it could significantly reduce the cost and time required to transport water from Earth, facilitating the establishment of a human base for long-term activities on the moon and enabling further exploration of Mars or deep space,” Tang Yuhua, the deputy chief designer of the Chang’e-7 mission, said in a 2025 interview with state media.

The oncoming flurry of south-pole-centric activity, with few established international laws to govern the outcomes, is heightening the drama of this rivalry. The dynamic echoes the Cold War, when NASA’s moon landings sought to project power and showcase on the world stage that technology produced by Western capitalism was superior to that of Eastern communism.

But with a much more ambitious goal — a future in which people attempt to flourish within permanent settlements rather than just visit the moon — the stakes of this new space race are even higher, according to Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan nonprofit.

“The long-term vision will take generations to execute on,” Swope said. “But in my mind, it’s a scenario where there are people being born, people dying, their families, children growing up in a place that is not Earth — so that looks a lot like a city, more than it looks like an expedition to the south pole.”

If such a future comes to fruition, Swope added, his hope is that such extraterrestrial colonies would be governed by rules reminiscent of Western ideals and democratic principles. Whether China would be on the same page is an open question.

A cultural prophecy

China’s space ambitions come straight from the top.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called building the country into a space power an “eternal dream.” He’s long positioned that ambition within his overarching vision for the country’s “rejuvenation,” which aims to bring China to a place of power and prominence globally, including in science and technology.

“The pace of human space exploration is endless,” Xi said in a 2020 speech. “Step-by-step, you will embark on a new interstellar exploration journey, making new contributions to building a strong aerospace nation and realizing China’s great rejuvenation.”

Some of the names used with China’s space program also allude to the moon’s deep cultural significance. The lunar program, for example, is named for the goddess Chang’e, described in a 4,000-year-old myth, who is celebrated each year at the Mid-Autumn Festival.

The program’s pursuits are not merely scientific — “but also a dream of the Chinese nation for thousands of years,” said Ouyang Ziyuan, the program’s chief scientist, in 2015.

More recently, the country has set its sights on expanding its exploration efforts beyond robotics, aiming to become only the second nation in the world to put its own citizens on the moon.

“We will spare no effort to strive for the goal of achieving the first Chinese landing on the moon by 2030,” Zhang Jingbo, a spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency, said in May.

After 12 NASA astronauts successfully walked on the moon and returned with about 850 pounds (385 kilograms) of lunar rock and soil, no person has set foot on the lunar surface since the Apollo program concluded in 1972.

It’s not clear how much money China is spending on its lunar program, as even experts who follow its efforts closely lack insight into the country’s coffers. But given the pace and precision with which China has operated its robotic Chang’e missions, many experts believe the country will reach its 2030 goal.

CNN has reached out to China’s State Council, which oversees the China National Space Administration, for comment.

“One of the challenges with China is there’s no transparency,” former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine previously told CNN.

“But what we do know,” Bridenstine said, “is that when they give themselves milestones, they hit them.”

Bridenstine has also said that he believes the next people to walk on the moon will most likely be taikonauts, or Chinese astronauts.

That’s concerning to American lawmakers, policymakers and former NASA leadership. While NASA’s current road map proposes landing astronauts on the moon by 2028, the timeline has already shifted repeatedly and is widely expected to face further delays due to engineering and technological challenges.

For his part, current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has acknowledged that China is “absolutely a great competitor” — “not just in space, it’s across the board.”

“I’m telling you conclusively now that the Chinese will be able to do what the Soviets were not: They will land their taikonauts on the moon,” Isaacman said in an interview with CNN for the documentary “Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos and the New Space Race.” But Isaacman has also said publicly that he is “confident” the US will rise to the challenge and meet its 2028 deadline.

An evolving rival

The United States has made significant strides with its human exploration efforts — most notably with the Artemis II mission that sent four astronauts on a trip around the moon in April.

But NASA still does not have a vehicle capable of getting astronauts down to the lunar surface.

Returning to the moon is not as simple as repeating Apollo. The space agency cannot — and does not wish to — replicate its 20th century lunar-landing success. The supply chains, skilled machinists and factories that built Apollo’s rockets, landers and command modules no longer exist.

And while the Apollo landings stuck close to the lunar equator, landing near the south pole is substantially more complex and requires more powerful vehicles.

NASA’s reliance on the private sector to bring this next generation of astronaut-worthy lunar landers to fruition stems in part from the agency facing a more limited budget than it had in the Apollo days.

“We certainly haven’t funded NASA as if this has been a race,” said Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit exploration advocacy group, in a previous interview with CNN. “So we don’t want to put our space agency in the position of suddenly being framed as losing when we haven’t really given them the resources necessary even to truly compete.”

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are working to develop lunar landers capable of realizing NASA’s goals. And the first real test of those systems could come next year with Artemis III, a mission that aims to send a prototype lander from each company to low-Earth orbit to practice docking with NASA’s Orion crew capsule.

It’s not clear whether either SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, as the vehicles are called, will be ready for the test next year. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. A Blue Origin spokesperson pointed to a speech from June, in which John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence, said the company expects to complete the vehicle for Artemis III and be ready for next year as it makes “excellent progress” recovering from a recent mishap.

And even if Artemis III is successful, the companies will still be facing substantial engineering challenges. Both Blue Moon and Starship, for example, need to be refueled in Earth orbit before attempting a lunar touchdown. Neither company has yet attempted such a feat. The process would involve attempting to transfer tons of super-cold cryogenic propellants between rendezvoused spacecraft — which has never been done in the history of spaceflight.

If the project seems somewhat convoluted and unnecessarily complex, Dreier has emphasized that’s in part because the US space program has been subject to budget uncertainties and the shifting whims of presidential administrations.

Only in the past decade — a short period of time in the grand scheme of developing lunar technologies — has NASA’s Artemis program narrowed the agency’s focus to the moon.

China’s simplicity

China, meanwhile, has been laser focused on its lunar exploration program since 2004, using its top-down, central planning system to keep resources flowing toward specific goals.

The rocket, spacecraft and lunar lander China is building to realize its dreams look far different from the vehicles the US is developing.

Details shared by state-run media indicate the China is pursuing a streamlined approach, capable of getting humans on the moon with the launch of just two rockets: one for an astronaut capsule and the other for a lunar lander, called Lanyue. The vehicles would have to dock in orbit, but they would not require in-space refueling like the US approach.

And while China has not completed a lunar flyby or flown its Lanyue lander to space for testing, it has demonstrated key vehicular capabilities, most notably with a series of ground tests last August that showed off the spacecraft’s navigation, propulsion and sensing features. China also carried out a key test flight in February of its Long March 10 lunar rocket and the Mengzhou crew spacecraft.

Overall, China’s technological pathway to getting its taikonauts on the moon by 2030 appears more straightforward than the United States’, said Patrick Besha, a former NASA strategic adviser and expert on China’s space program who was laid off by DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, last year.

“Some of the hurdles that are remaining are not instrumental,” Besha said. “These are not unsolvable problems.”

The long-term vision

Many American leaders appear preoccupied with putting boots back on the moon, but space policy experts question whether short-term victories are as important as long-term commitment.

Besha said he prefers to think of the dynamic between the US and China as more of an “international competition” than a race — specifically because the idea of a race conjures the idea of a clear finish line.

Simply landing an astronaut on the lunar surface, experts argue, would be a powerful display of national prestige, but it would not guarantee either country enduring dominance in the realm of space exploration. And it’s a feat the US already achieved years ago.

Constructing a lunar base, however, is an entirely different matter.

China — which in prior years worked closely with Russia to map its plans — has been fine-tuning its blueprints for such a settlement for years. The country envisions the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS, as a sprawling science-focused facility on the moon’s surface that can be operated robotically, “with the prospect of subsequent human presence,” according to a government’s ILRS website.

China could partner with Russia to build a massive nuclear reactor to power the base, though questions remain regarding how the war in Ukraine may impact Russia’s ability to deliver.

“An important question for the ILRS is power supply, and in this Russia has a natural advantage,” Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program, told Reuters in 2025. “When it comes to nuclear power plants, especially sending them into space, it leads the world. It is ahead of the United States.”

Russia inherited nuclear know-how that the Soviet Union advanced during the Cold War, when it launched more than 30 satellites equipped with fission reactors. The US, by comparison, has only launched one such satellite, called SNAP-10A, in 1965, though NASA has made a concerted effort recently to advance its nuclear space technologies.

China and Russia were mapping these plans long before the US announced its own intention to build a nuclear reactor on the moon last year and detailed its plans for a lunar settlement spanning hundreds of square miles.

Worlds apart

At the heart of this lunar contest is the question of how such an extraterrestrial settlement will be governed: What will the lives of lunar inhabitants look like? Who will write the rules? And how, exactly, will the use of lunar resources be policed on the international stage?

The United States has outlined its intentions in a document called the Artemis Accords — a 2020 pact that codifies what has long been US domestic policy: Nations and commercial companies should be able to extract resources, and countries can implement “safety zones” to protect such activities, essentially barring outsiders from entering certain areas of the moon.

Seventy countries have signed the accords. But China and several of its closest allies — including Pakistan, Belarus, Russia and Egypt — have not.

The United States has also made clear that it wants to use water ice to sustain its astronauts and welcome commercial operators to set up their own infrastructure.

A few US companies are currently pursuing plans to mine and sell valuable lunar resources. Helium-3 — an isotope that’s extremely rare on Earth but possibly abundant on the moon — could be used in fields such as quantum computing or nuclear fusion.

But therein lies a legal quandary.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which remains the central document of international space law, states that “outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

Most Western scholars say the treaty language leaves room for interpretation.

While the pact seems to make clear that a nation can’t simply lay claim to territory on the moon, it leaves open questions about what would happen if a country built a power plant — which must be surrounded by a “keep out” zone for safety reasons — or begins to harvest lunar materials.

But there is “inherent difficulty squaring the circle,” Swope said, when it comes to allowing countries or companies to extract lunar resources.

“If you can’t appropriate it, how do you own it?” Swope mused. “There’s a disconnect there. That’s what essentially has to be bridged by looking the other way, which we’ve done with US law.”

China’s stance on whether resources can or should be harvested and used for commercial or national gain is less clear. But Chinese officials have occasionally shared comments that suggest a willingness to embrace resource extraction.

China typically frames its ambitions as “advancing human progress” and says that it “upholds the principle of exploration and utilization of outer space for peaceful purposes.”

“The moon has an abundance of mineral resources, including titanium, silicon and aluminum. Among them, the most valuable is Helium-3,” said Guo Hongfeng, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Ouyang also told the BBC in 2013 that these valuable resources “can be used without limitation.”

That statement may indicate a willingness to push the limits of international law, Besha said.

“China — publicly and in forums like the United Nations — has hewed closely to the Outer Space Treaty, the idea that no country can appropriate territory,” he said. “But they also indicated that, while they wouldn’t violate the treaty, they would come right up to the line.”

Collaboration vs. competition

The lack of straightforward, international rules and clarity about the 1967 treaty could set the stage for dangerous conflicts. But experts also emphasize that the moon — and the lunar south pole — are large, perhaps offering enough resources for both nations to realize their visions in tandem.

Each country may operate within their own spheres of influence. “I do not think China will impose their rules on us, and I don’t think we can impose our rules on China,” Swope said of the norms that may take shape in this era of lunar exploration.

But the current climate is one in which strict lines are being drawn. Citing concerns about espionage and intellectual property theft, the US has refused to work with China and last year even banned visa-holding Chinese nationals from working at NASA.

While the US and China have historically shared scientific research data, export control laws, specifically the United States’ International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and a 2011 law known as the Wolf Amendment, strictly limit how NASA can collaborate with its Chinese counterparts.

But in the long term, Swope and Besha each said they believe frosty relations and a lack of coordination between the two nations may not be sustainable.

If the 20th century space race serves as any blueprint, years of competition generated astounding technological strides before the Soviet Union and the United States opted to begin working together. This cooperation culminated in the International Space Station, which the US and Russia still jointly operate.

In the next iteration of global powers battling for dominance in space, Besha wonders whether there is “room to solve some of the global challenges that we will face,” such as mitigating the risks of collisions in space or coordinating the search for asteroids that may pose a risk to Earth.

“We should also think about whether there is space for cooperation,” he said.