When is China landing on the Moon?

Facts as of October 9, 2026, from the sources listed below.

China officially targets its first crewed Moon landing before 2030, a goal the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has reaffirmed repeatedly, including on 23 May 2026, when its spokesman Zhang Jingbo told the Shenzhou-23 pre-launch press conference that the programme is striving with all its strength to meet the goal of a first Chinese landing on the Moon before 2030, on schedule (as of October 9, 2026). The programme is already deep into hardware testing: an in-flight abort test of the crew spacecraft flew in February 2026, and CMSA said in October 2025 that the rocket, lander, spacecraft, suit, and rover had completed the main work of their prototype stage.

2030

first crewed landing targeted before (restated May 23, 2026)

Long March 10 launches per landing mission

27t

CZ-10 payload to trans-lunar injection

astronauts the Lanyue lander carries to the surface and back

Targets are official CMSA goals (as of October 9, 2026) and can change.

01The hardware, all five named

Five named elements, all in development: the Long March-10 rocket (the new heavy launcher built to send the crew spacecraft and the lunar lander toward the Moon), the Mengzhou crew spacecraft, the Lanyue lunar lander, the Wangyu lunar EVA suit, and the Tansuo crewed rover. A sixth vehicle matters without going to the Moon: the Long March-10A, a single-stick crew-rated variant that is built to fly Mengzhou to the Tiangong space station and has yet to make its orbital debut. CMSA said on 23 May 2026 that the two systems share an integrated design, and that several space station flights over the next two years are meant to raise the lunar system's maturity, which makes the uncrewed Mengzhou-1 debut the programme's next real test. The mission uses two Long March-10 launches and a lunar-orbit rendezvous: the lander flies first, the crew follows, and they dock in lunar orbit before two taikonauts descend.

Full-scale mockup of the Lanyue crewed lunar lander in a museum hall — Full-scale mockup of the Lanyue lunar lander, National Museum of China, Beijing. Credit: Shujianyang via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0.

Mockup of the Mengzhou new-generation crewed spacecraft on display — Mockup of China’s next-generation crewed spacecraft (the Mengzhou lineage), National Museum of China. Credit: Shujianyang via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0.

Rocket lifting off from Wenchang during the Mengzhou max-Q abort test — The Feb 11, 2026 max-Q in-flight abort test lifting off from Wenchang: Mengzhou escaped at maximum dynamic pressure about a minute later. Credit: China News Service via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Tap a photo to enlarge.

Lunar-landing phase formally announced	May 29, 2023, by CMSA deputy director Lin Xiqiang: first Chinese crewed lunar landing before 2030
Mission architecture	Dual launch: two Long March 10 rockets send the Lanyue lander and the crewed Mengzhou spacecraft separately to lunar orbit for rendezvous and docking
Surface plan	Two astronauts ride the Lanyue lander down for what CMSA calls a short-term stay on the surface (月面短期驻留), with the Tansuo rover. CMSA's program description gives no duration; the widely quoted six hours matches the minimum surface stay CMSA asked for in a 2018 ideas contest for a crewed lander
Long March 10 (tri-core lunar version)	92.5 m tall, about 2,189 t at liftoff, 27 t to trans-lunar injection, 70 t to LEO
Element names	Mengzhou spacecraft and Lanyue lander named Feb 24, 2024; Wangyu lunar suit and Tansuo rover named Feb 12, 2025 (public contests)
Mengzhou zero-altitude pad abort	Jun 17, 2025, Jiuquan; capsule landed on airbags about 2 minutes after ignition; China's first pad abort test since 1998; declared fully successful
Lanyue landing and takeoff test	Aug 6, 2025, Huailai, Hebei; full-scale lander flew in a purpose-built extraterrestrial-gravity simulator; first Chinese off-Earth landing-and-ascent trial for a crew vehicle
CZ-10 first static fire	Aug 15, 2025, LC-301 Wenchang; seven YF-100K engines, thrust near 1,000 t, largest such test ever in China
CZ-10 second static fire	Sep 12, 2025; seven engines, 320 seconds, including restarts simulating launch, re-entry, and landing for a reusable first stage
Prototype stage complete	Oct 30, 2025: CMSA spokesperson Zhang Jingbo said CZ-10, Mengzhou, Lanyue, Wangyu suit, and rover "have completed the main work of the prototype stage"

02What has actually happened

29 May 2023
CMSA announces the lunar-landing phase: crewed landing before 2030
24 Feb 2024
Spacecraft named Mengzhou ("dream vessel"), lander named Lanyue ("embracing the Moon")
12 Feb 2025
Lunar suit named Wangyu, crew rover named Tansuo, from 9,000+ public entries
17 Jun 2025
Mengzhou zero-altitude pad abort at Jiuquan, first such Chinese test in 27 years; fully successful
6 Aug 2025
Lanyue full-scale landing-and-takeoff test at Huailai, Hebei, in an extraterrestrial-gravity simulator
15 Aug 2025
First CZ-10 static fire at Wenchang LC-301: seven YF-100K engines, ~1,000 t thrust
12 Sep 2025
Second CZ-10 static fire: 320 s with engine restarts for reusability
30 Oct 2025
CMSA: all five major flight products completed the main work of the prototype stage
11 Feb 2026
Max-Q in-flight abort at Wenchang: Mengzhou escapes about one minute into flight at roughly 10-11 km; China's first sea-based recovery of a crewed-spacecraft capsule; booster demonstrates recovery maneuvers
23 May 2026
CMSA merges the crewed lunar landing and robotic Chang'e programs across missions, resources and teams into a single 'Lunar Exploration Project' (月球探测工程), and restates the before-2030 landing target
10 Jul 2026
CZ-10B maiden orbital flight; first stage caught in the Linghang Zhe ship's net: China's first orbital-booster recovery
2026 (listed, no date; slip to 2027 reported)
CZ-10A maiden orbital flight carrying the uncrewed Mengzhou-1 to low Earth orbit (as of 9 Oct 2026)

Teal dots: hardware flew or fired. Grey: announcements, namings, and targets.

03The mission plan

The dual-launch lunar-orbit rendezvous: one Long March 10 sends the Lanyue lander, a second sends the crewed Mengzhou; they dock in lunar orbit before the descent. Credit: Kaynouky via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

China formally started the landing phase of its crewed lunar effort on May 29, 2023, when CMSA deputy director Lin Xiqiang announced the goal of putting Chinese astronauts on the Moon before 2030. The architecture is a dual-launch lunar-orbit rendezvous: one Long March 10 sends the Lanyue lander to lunar orbit, a second sends the crewed Mengzhou spacecraft, the two dock, two astronauts descend for what CMSA calls a short-term stay on the surface, with the Tansuo rover, then the Lanyue ascent vehicle returns them to Mengzhou for the trip home. Every element carries a poetic public-contest name: Mengzhou ("dream vessel", Feb 24, 2024), Lanyue ("embracing the Moon", from a Mao Zedong poem, same date), the Wangyu ("gazing into the cosmos") suit and Tansuo ("to explore") rover (Feb 12, 2025).

2025 was the year the hardware started flying. On June 17, 2025 a Mengzhou test capsule performed a zero-altitude pad abort at Jiuquan, China's first such test since a Shenzhou trial in 1998, landing on airbags two minutes later. On August 6, 2025 a full-scale Lanyue flew a combined landing-and-takeoff test inside a purpose-built extraterrestrial-gravity rig at Huailai, Hebei, the first Chinese trial of an off-Earth landing and ascent for a crew vehicle. At Wenchang's new LC-301 pad, a shortened CZ-10 first stage fired its seven YF-100K engines on August 15, 2025 (nearly 1,000 tonnes of thrust, the largest static fire in Chinese history) and again on September 12, 2025 for 320 seconds with restarts that rehearsed a reusable booster's flight profile. On October 30, 2025 CMSA declared the prototype stage's main work complete for all five major flight products.

The campaign accelerated in 2026. On February 11, a Long March 10 test booster (CMSA calls the flight a low-altitude demonstration of the Long March 10 system) lifted off from Wenchang and, about one minute in at roughly 10 to 11 km altitude, the abort system pulled Mengzhou away at maximum dynamic pressure while the booster continued a recovery-simulation profile of relights and powered deceleration, splashing down at a preset simulated landing point about 200 meters from its recovery vessel, according to Zhu Pingping of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, quoted by Science and Technology Daily. The capsule's parachute descent into the sea produced another first: what Global Times, quoting CASC experts and the China Manned Space Agency, called China's first sea-based search and recovery operation for a crewed spacecraft.

Then, on July 10, 2026 at 04:15 UTC, the Long March 10B, a single-stick 16-tonne-to-LEO cargo and commercial variant of the same first stage, reached orbit from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site and its booster was caught by the tensioned-net system of the Linghang Zhe ("navigator") recovery ship six minutes after staging. That made China the second country ever to recover an orbital-class booster, via the world's first net recovery, and the Long March 10B development team said on July 10, 2026 that it expects to fly a reused first stage before the end of 2026. CASC has also outlined a methalox CZ-10C as a future commercial workhorse. For the lunar program, the flight validated the first-stage design shared with the crew-rated CZ-10A.

What has not happened yet, as of October 9, 2026: no CZ-10A has flown, and no crewed mission of the lunar program has launched. The next gate is Mengzhou-1, the uncrewed orbital debut of both Mengzhou and the CZ-10A, announced by CMSA on November 1, 2025 for a 2026 flight, with no date given since. CMSA has not formally moved that year, but its February 27, 2026 annual plan (two crewed flights and one cargo flight in 2026) does not name Mengzhou-1, nor did its outlook for the second half of 2026, and trackers reported in July 2026 that the flight will probably slip into 2027. The bigger change since is structural: on May 23, 2026 CMSA said the crewed lunar landing effort and the robotic Chang'e effort had been merged across missions, resources and teams into a single program, 月球探测工程, the Lunar Exploration Project, and that the near-Earth CZ-10A and Mengzhou system shares an integrated design with the CZ-10 and lunar Mengzhou, so that several space station flights over the next two years will raise the lunar system's maturity. CMSA's February 27, 2026 annual plan keeps the before-2030 landing target and focuses 2026 work on lunar-mission ground infrastructure at Wenchang plus tracking, communications, and landing-site systems. No landing site has been officially announced, so this program page gets no globe pin yet.

Commonly reported wrong: Three recurring errors in English coverage. (1) The target is a landing "before 2030" (官方: 2030年前), which English sources routinely soften to "by 2030" or "around 2030"; officials have used the same phrasing consistently since May 2023. (2) Anything written before July 10, 2026 saying "only SpaceX and Blue Origin have recovered orbital-class boosters" or "China's Moon rocket has never flown" is now stale: the CZ-10B variant reached orbit and its stage was net-recovered at sea that day, though the crew-rated CZ-10A itself has still not flown as of October 9, 2026. (3) Mengzhou is often called an "upgraded Shenzhou"; it is a clean-sheet new-generation spacecraft (its uncrewed prototype flew in May 2020 on the first CZ-5B), and the Feb 11, 2026 flight was a suborbital abort test, sometimes misreported as the CZ-10's orbital debut. Bonus: official English releases translate Tansuo as "Exploration", so "Exploration rover" and "Tansuo rover" are the same vehicle.

04Who lands first?

Both targets are real and both can slip. NASA's Artemis IV, the next crewed landing attempt by anyone, is targeted for early 2028 (as of September 28, 2026); China targets before 2030 (as of October 9, 2026). No human from any nation has been on the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

05Sources

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