With Dreams of a Lunar Outpost, China Takes New Risks in Space Race With U.S.
China puts its space ambitions on display as it blasts three astronauts into orbit from a remote desert launch center
JIUQUAN SATELLITE LAUNCH CENTER, China—As a graduate student in Switzerland in the 1980s, Chinese aerospace scientist Ye Peijian paid a visit to the World Intellectual Property Organization, where a moon rock from the Apollo program was on display as a symbol of U.S. power in space.
“Decades have gone by, but it’s still there,” Ye, who later played a leading role in China’s space program, told Chinese state media recently. “Because no one has surpassed them.”
Today, China is closer than ever. Its space officials brim with confidence as they signal a growing appetite for high-risk missions to more quickly close the gap with the U.S. in a new race to the moon, Mars and beyond.
U.S. officials fear that China will employ tactics in space that it has used to advance territorial claims on Earth, including beating out the U.S. in building a crewed outpost on the moon and attempting to lay claim to its resources.
“It’s not even an exaggeration to say China will be a global power in space by 2030,” said Ye, who helped run China’s first uncrewed mission to orbit the moon and has advised on several others.
China put its ambitions on display before dawn on Wednesday as it blasted three astronauts into orbit from a remote desert launch center.
The astronauts, two of them in their 30s, will spend roughly six months at China’s space station. Some of their experiments will be intended to help prepare for China’s most difficult mission yet: landing astronauts on the moon by 2030.
Wednesday’s Shenzhou-19 mission, covered extensively in state media, sought to evoke pride in China’s trajectory as many citizens struggle financially in a souring economy.
“I am very lucky to have been born into a great motherland,” mission commander Cai Xuzhe said ahead of the launch.
The mission is another step in the rivalry with the U.S. as the nations employ different strategies in a bid for leadership over the future of space exploration.
The U.S. has provided a greater role to private companies for space missions, with mixed results. In a recent high-profile stumble, NASA chose to keep two American astronauts on the International Space Station for months after an earlier return date because of agency concerns about the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that was meant to return them to Earth in June.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has emerged as the dominant global space company, developing partially reusable rockets that China hasn’t been able to match. The company is trying to extend its lead on reusability with the massive Starship vehicle it is developing.
Unlike the U.S. shift to private companies, efforts in China remain firmly under the control of the Communist Party, which allows only a limited role for outside firms. Chinese space officials say the setup provides a strategic advantage, with centralized decision-making allowing them to set goals years in advance and then steadily work toward achieving them.
China’s growing confidence and ambition is also a consequence of endorsement from the top. When Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with representatives of the country’s most recent lunar mission in Beijing in September, he praised the program and called on scientists to pick up the pace to turn the country into a space power.
While China aims to land astronauts on the moon by 2030, the U.S. wants to get back there first. Winning a race against China isn’t just a matter of national pride, say U.S. officials. The moon’s south pole—of increasing interest to both countries—contains resources that could prove critical to a future crewed lunar base, including ice that can be turned into water or oxygen.
“My concern is that they don’t get there first and then say, ‘This is our area. You stay out,’” NASA’s Nelson told a congressional hearing earlier this year.
China says it only intends to pursue peaceful exploration in space as a benefit for all of humanity.
In June, China laid down the biggest marker of its progress yet when it became the first country to return rock samples from the far side of the moon.
It wants to top that feat by launching a mission to retrieve the first soil samples from Mars around 2028, a timeline that was just brought forward by two years, and would potentially beat out a similar U.S. effort that has been mired by delays and rising costs.
“The Chinese are very confident,” said Dean Cheng, a nonresident fellow at the George Washington University Space Policy Institute. “They have every right to be.”
Beijing ultimately aims to build a lunar research base with a host of friendly countries including Russia. Moscow’s status as a space power is waning, meaning China would be forced to carry the bulk of the project.
China remains behind the U.S. in many areas, including rocket technology and mission know-how. While China has recorded major accomplishments in orbit, NASA has also pulled off groundbreaking scientific missions in recent years, including the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope.
“The U.S. program is not only the largest financially, it is also the most diverse,” said Brian Harvey, who has written extensively about China’s space program.
In pursuing more ambitious targets today, China is seeking to overcome a longtime aversion to risk in its space program. Senior space officials have long known that they can be personally held accountable if missions fail.
Li Yingliang, an official in China’s crewed space program, said ahead of Wednesday’s launch that China’s rising conviction was a result of years of experience and technological advancements—and a strong belief in China’s political and economic system.
“In the field of human spaceflight, we can say we’ve reached an advanced level by global standards,” Li said.
It wasn’t always this way. A shift in thinking started getting more apparent around a decade ago, soon after China had successfully landed a rover on the moon for the first time.
With the country’s growing experience, Chinese space experts began debating what to do next.
Ye, the Switzerland-educated space scientist, said many advocated a repeat of the previous mission, a safer strategy.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” was the thinking, he recalled in the interview with China’s state broadcaster.
Instead, he said he urged them to send the rover to the back side of the moon, a far riskier proposition.
The push to take more risks in pursuit of progress eventually won out and the new mission succeeded, spurring the program onward in the years that followed.
The Chinese space program’s biggest challenges lie ahead. In publicly issuing a 2030 deadline for the crewed lunar mission, it has faced a conundrum in that its rocket-of-choice for the endeavor, the Long March-10, can’t carry a sufficiently heavy payload to pull off the mission.
Instead of postponing until China’s rocket technology improves, Beijing plans to launch two Long March-10 rockets toward the moon, one carrying the crew and another with the lunar lander. Then, while in the moon’s orbit, the two must perform a complex docking maneuver.
Chinese space officials say they are confident they can pull it off.
Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com and Clarence Leong at clarence.leong@wsj.com