An Assessment of China's Space Program

It wasn’t that long ago that English-language news articles were stating that China was planning on landing humans on the Moon by 2017. In fact, as late as 2007 some articles were claiming that this would happen by 2010. Of course, they were wrong, and even the 2017 claims have faded. Conducting a post-mortem on those articles, it was obvious even at the time that many of them were the result of translation errors. Chinese officials announced plans for unmanned lunar orbital missions by 2010 and lunar sample return missions by 2017 and somebody dropped the “un” part of “unmanned” and jumped to conclusions that the Chinese were going to send humans to the Moon in the very near future. (See, for instance, “The phony space race”, The Space Review, June 9, 2003—yes, 2003.) Other articles making these claims were less error than malice—people selectively quoting sources in order to try and justify a US human lunar return by claiming that we were in a race with China. They can consider themselves lucky that the noise of the Internet frequently drowns out mistakes and malice in its maelstrom.

In fact, once you start looking back at this subject over the past decade, it becomes quite apparent that the Chinese government was both open and accurate about its human spaceflight and lunar exploration plans, even while concealing virtually everything about their military space program. As early as 2007 Chinese officials were discussing their plans for human spaceflight, indicating that the country would launch a series of increasingly ambitious human orbital spacecraft with the goal of developing a multi-component space station by 2020. Human lunar missions were not in their portfolio. However, they also indicated that they had a three-phase robotic lunar exploration plan. Phase I was to orbit the Moon with robotic spacecraft. Phase II was to land a rover on the Moon. And Phase III was to eventually conduct a robotic lunar sample return mission by 2017. (See “History doesn’t echo, it reverbs”, The Space Review, February 10, 2010.) The Chinese did not provide all of the details of their plans, but over time they revealed more information, and so far they have accomplished the first two phases.

What various Chinese officials have also repeatedly stated is that human lunar missions may eventually be in their future, but that the government will likely not make any decisions about that until after the multi-segment space station is operational, meaning sometime in the 2020s.

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