China

China launched approximately 70 orbital missions in 2024. That's more than every nation other than the United States combined, and it's growing roughly 15% a year. The country operates a permanently crewed space station (Tiangong, fully assembled in 2022), has landed three rovers on the Moon (including the first ever far-side landing with Chang'e 4 in 2019), has returned lunar samples (Chang'e 5 in 2020 and Chang'e 6 from the lunar far side in 2024), has landed a rover on Mars (Zhurong with Tianwen-1 in 2021), has flown two indigenous reusable spaceplanes through multiple test cycles, and is deploying three separate mega-constellation programs simultaneously. By every measure other than commercial-private-investment, the Chinese space program is now the second-largest in history and growing faster than any other.

The institutional architecture is both larger and harder to map than in the West. CNSA — the China National Space Administration — is the public face of the program but does relatively little operationally. The actual work is done by CASC (China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the heavy-lift launch and crewed-spaceflight prime contractor), CASIC (its sister company, more focused on solid-fuel launchers and missile-derivatives), the China Manned Space Engineering Office for Tiangong and Shenzhou, the Lunar and Deep Space Exploration Center for the planetary missions, and various academy-of-sciences institutes for science payloads. There are also multiple military-civil-fusion programs whose published activity is partial. The 53 Chinese organisations on our directory understate the scale of the actual industrial base; verifying organisations against open sources from outside the country is much harder than in OECD jurisdictions, and the directory holds itself to that verification standard.

What we can verify is what flies. The Long March family remains the workhorse, with CZ-2D, CZ-2F (crewed), CZ-3B (GTO), CZ-5 (heavy lift), CZ-6 and CZ-7 (next-generation methane and kerolox vehicles), and CZ-8 (smallsat optimised) all in active service. The newer commercial launchers — Kuaizhou, Ceres-1, Hyperbola, Zhuque-2 (the world's first methane-fuelled rocket to reach orbit, in 2023) — add another twelve to fifteen flights a year. Reusable demonstrators from Space Epoch, Landspace and Orienspace performed their first vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing hop tests in 2024. Operational reusable orbital flight from these vehicles is targeted for 2026-2028 and is on track to happen.

The Tiangong space station is the program's most visible achievement. Three modules — Tianhe core, Wentian and Mengtian science labs — were assembled in orbit between 2021 and 2022. China has had at least three taikonauts continuously aboard since June 2022. Crew rotations are roughly six months. The station hosts science experiments, accommodates international payloads (Pakistan, Russia, several European universities have flown experiments), and is the only fully sovereign space station in the world. The ISS is currently planned to deorbit around 2030; if it does, Tiangong will be the only human-occupied platform in low Earth orbit until the commercial successors come online. China has also publicly committed to expanding Tiangong with additional modules before then.

The constellation deployment is the second front. Guowang (also called Xingwang, or G60 Qianfan in some sources) is a state-backed LEO broadband constellation targeting roughly 14,000 satellites; SpaceSail (formerly Honghu) targets 1,296. Both are launching aggressively. Combined first-batch deployments in 2024 and 2025 put roughly 200 Chinese broadband satellites into LEO; the planned cadence accelerates from there. The strategic intent is unambiguous: China intends to have a global satellite-broadband alternative to Starlink in service before the end of this decade. Whether the deployment timeline holds is the open question; the political will to fund it is clear.

The lunar program is the third front and the one with the longest planning horizon. Chang'e 7 launches in 2026 toward the lunar south pole; Chang'e 8 follows in 2028 with in-situ resource utilisation experiments; the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) — a joint China-Russia-and-various-partners base — is targeted for 2035. China's crewed lunar landing is publicly committed for "before 2030", which most external analysts read as 2029 or 2030. The architecture is conservative — two Long March 10 launches assembling a separate landing stack and crew vehicle in low lunar orbit — but the engineering is funded and progressing.

From the outside, the Chinese program looks both impressive and slightly incomprehensible. The launch cadence is real. The hardware is real. The science returns from Chang'e and Tianwen are real. What's harder to assess from outside is the financial cost, the engineering supply-chain risks, and the rate at which the genuinely innovative commercial-launch sector will catch up to or supplant the state programs. The honest answer is: nobody outside the country fully knows. What's clear is that by 2030 the global space industry will be a US-China duopoly with everyone else — including India, Japan, Europe and Russia — operating in a smaller third tier. The duopoly is not symmetric (the US still leads on capital and per-launch capability), but it is, for the first time since the Cold War, a genuine duopoly. That's the single biggest structural change in spaceflight since 1991.