China and the US on the Moon: a status update.

Fifty-four years ago, humans left the Moon and promised to call back. This February, the two biggest space programmes finally started dialling — sixteen days apart.

On February 11, China's Long March 10 — the rocket built to carry its astronauts to the Moon — flew for the first time, testing the crew capsule's escape system and booster recovery in a single flight. On February 27, NASA moved Artemis III to an Earth-orbit rehearsal for late 2027, shifting the first landing to Artemis IV in 2028.

NASA says 2028. China says 2029–2030. For the first time since the 1960s, the two schedules sit inside each other's margin of error — in space-schedule terms, a photo finish.

Two pipelines, audited

China's test record is unusually clean: four robotic landing attempts since 2013 — Chang'e-3, 4, 5 and 6 — and four successes, including history's first far-side landing and its only far-side sample return: 1,935 grams, returned in 2024 with international payloads aboard. The crewed cadence is sharper still. The Mengzhou capsule passed its pad-abort test in June 2025 and its max-Q abort in February — the two gates SpaceX cleared four and a half years apart. China closed them in eight months. (Not a typo.) Reusability runs the other way: China is roughly where SpaceX stood in 2014.

The American record reads differently. NASA buys robotic landings from private companies, and after two Intuitive Machines landers tipped over on touchdown, the bet paid off: Firefly's Blue Ghost flew a complete, upright surface mission in March 2025 — the first American spacecraft to manage that in over fifty years. The crewed side is heavier: roughly $4.1 billion per SLS/Orion flight, per NASA's own inspector general, against about $100 million for a Long March 5.

The rest of the field

The headline programmes aren't the whole picture: since 2013, every successful robotic Moon landing by a national space agency has been Asian. India's Chandrayaan-3 made it the fourth country to land, in 2023, on roughly $75 million — less than it cost to make the film Interstellar, a comparison Indian engineers have been enjoying ever since. Japan's SLIM made it the fifth, touching down 55 metres from its target against a 100-metre requirement. South Korea's Danuri has been mapping the Moon from orbit since 2022. And Tokyo-based ispace, after losing its first two landers — the second to a faulty laser rangefinder — published its failure analysis, brought in former NASA and JAXA engineers, and kept two 2027 missions on schedule, including a NASA far-side flight with Draper.

What they're racing for

Apollo was geopolitics; once the point was made, the funding ended. Today the constraint has flipped: launch costs have fallen from about $54,500 per kilogram in the Shuttle era to under $3,000 on a Falcon 9. What the Moon lacks is a customer — and dead markets get started by an anchor buyer, the way NASA's cargo contracts turned SpaceX into an industry. This decade, the Moon gets two at once.

They want the same ground: south-polar sites where near-constant sunlight sits beside craters of water ice — power, life support and rocket propellant in one postcode. (India's Chandrayaan-1 confirmed the water, in 2009.) Shackleton crater's rim is the most studied: NASA's candidate regions cluster there, the China–Russia station targets the same zone, and Chang'e-7 arrives around August to measure the ice. The Moon has 38 million square kilometres; everyone wants the same few hundred metres. Anyone who has hunted for an apartment near a good MRT station will understand.

Whoever operates first, legislates

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans national claims on the Moon and says nothing workable about mining or operating zones. The US answer is the Artemis Accords — 68 signatories, with "safety zones" around surface operations. The Chinese-Russian answer will be written in how the International Lunar Research Station — about 17 members — actually operates. Maritime law worked the same way: whoever operates first sets the customs that harden into rules. Both blocs are recruiting here: Thailand, Pakistan and Kazakhstan joined the ILRS, most of Asia's space players signed Artemis, and several governments signed both — the diplomatic version of taking two plates at the buffet.

Spot the mission

Which of these is not real Chinese lunar hardware? Answer at the bottom — no googling.

• a) Lanyue — the crewed lunar lander
• b) Mengzhou — the crew spacecraft
• c) Long March 10 — the Moon rocket
• d) Yuhang — the lunar cargo shuttle

What to do with this

• Investors — the two programmes report progress differently. NASA publishes schedule changes as they happen; China announces milestones once they're achieved. A NASA date and a Chinese date aren't the same kind of information — adjust for that before comparing the timelines side by side.
• Founders — the near-term customer is government, buying de-risking: simulants, testing, mapping, radiation-tolerant parts. We profiled Australia's simulant producer in Issue 05. Reliable landing remains the hardest, most valuable problem in the chain.
• Policymakers — polar norms will be set by practice, not negotiation. The usable sites are finite; late entrants inherit rules they didn't write.
• Precious subscribers — three dates: Chang'e-7 (August), Long March 10's orbital debut (late 2026), Artemis III's rehearsal (late 2027). Ignore the noise in between.

Is China winning? On paper, NASA lands first by a year or two; on execution record, the smart money hedges. The durable fact is simpler: after fifty years without a paying customer or a deadline, the Moon now has two of each. Not a bad decade to be watching from this side of the planet.

(The fake: Yuhang. The other three are real — and all three were tested within the past year.)

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If you're new here, start with the story behind this region's space boom: Dr. Bidushi Bhattacharya — the ex-NASA scientist who saw it coming from inside JPL, moved to Singapore, and built AstroHub.

Next issue: who actually owns the Moon? Nobody — and that's the problem. See you then.

Cheers!

— shirley