China Lunar Program 2025: Chang'e 7, Long March 10, and the South Pole Race
China's lunar program in 2025 is on track: Chang'e 7 heads for the Moon's south pole, Long March 10 nears its first flight, and 17 nations have joined the ILRS. Here's where it all stands.
China’s lunar program in 2025 is operating at a pace with no precedent in the post-Apollo era. Having returned samples from the Moon’s far side in June 2024 with Chang’e-6 — a mission no other space agency had previously accomplished — CNSA is now accelerating toward its most ambitious targets: a crewed lunar landing before 2030 and the first elements of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) before the decade’s end. The trajectory matters not just for China, but for every nation planning lunar operations in the coming decade.
The trajectory is not accidental. China’s lunar programme has been systematically building capability for twenty years, each mission designed to prove technology for the next. What looked like deliberate incremental exploration now reads as precise groundwork for infrastructure.
The Chang’e Sequence and What It Proved
The Chang’e programme has executed five successful lunar missions since 2007, each testing a distinct capability:
Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 demonstrated orbital mapping and trajectory precision. Chang’e-3 executed the first soft landing on the Moon since the Soviet Luna 24 in 1976 and deployed the Yutu rover — China’s first surface mobile system. Chang’e-4 landed in the Von Kármán crater on the far side in January 2019, achieving what scientists had long considered one of the most valuable and challenging landing zones on the Moon: a site exposing material from the lunar mantle, receiving no direct Earth communication and requiring relay satellites above the L2 point to maintain contact.
Chang’e-5 returned 1.73 kg of lunar samples from the Rümker region of Oceanus Procellarum in December 2020 — the first lunar sample return since the Soviet Luna 24 in 1976 and the first Chinese sample return from anywhere.
Chang’e-6, launched in May 2024, targeted the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side — the oldest and deepest impact structure on the Moon, and arguably the most scientifically significant landing zone available. It returned approximately 1.9 kg of samples in June 2024, giving Chinese scientists unprecedented access to material from a region of the Moon that may preserve early solar system history untouched by the volcanism that resurfaced the near side.
Chang’e-7 and the South Pole Priority
Chang’e-7, currently in development, will target the lunar south pole — the same region identified by NASA’s Artemis programme as its primary objective, and for the same reason: the confirmed presence of water ice in permanently shadowed craters.
The Chang’e-7 mission architecture is substantially more complex than its predecessors. It will include an orbiter, lander, rover, and a small flying probe designed to descend into permanently shadowed regions to search for water ice in situ. This last element — a small hopping spacecraft that can physically enter craters too cold and dark for a conventional rover — represents a significant technical challenge that CNSA has been quietly developing for years.
The south pole target makes Chang’e-7 not just a scientific mission but a strategic one. Water ice can be extracted and electrolysed to produce both breathable oxygen and hydrogen fuel, making it the foundational resource for any sustained human presence on the Moon. Whoever maps, characterises, and establishes precedent for using south polar ice resources will have shaped the political and operational architecture of lunar exploration for decades.
The International Lunar Research Station
China’s most ambitious long-term lunar goal is the International Lunar Research Station — a joint programme with Russia announced in 2021, and subsequently opened to other partners. Several nations have expressed interest or signed cooperation agreements, including Pakistan, Venezuela, South Africa, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Thailand.
The ILRS roadmap calls for a robotic phase extending from the late 2020s to approximately 2035, during which infrastructure would be pre-positioned: energy systems, communications relays, and initial habitat structures. A crewed phase would begin around 2036, with long-duration stays enabled by in-situ resource utilisation.
The contrast with NASA’s Artemis programme is instructive. Artemis is primarily a US-led programme with allied partner nations (Japan, Canada, EU, UAE, among others) operating under the Artemis Accords framework — a set of principles around transparency, interoperability, and resource utilisation developed by NASA and its partners. China and Russia are not Artemis Accords signatories, and the ILRS represents an explicitly parallel architecture.
The practical result is that the Moon is becoming the arena of a genuine two-bloc structure in space exploration — not a new space race in the Cold War sense, but a bifurcated development of the lunar environment with two groups of nations building toward different infrastructure systems.
Crewed Lunar Landing Before 2030
Chinese officials have stated publicly that a crewed lunar landing is targeted before 2030. The key enabling systems are the Long March 10 super heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Mengzhou crewed spacecraft, and the Lanyue lunar lander — all in active development.
Long March 10, China’s first rocket in the Saturn V performance class, is designed to lift approximately 70 tonnes to low Earth orbit or support trans-lunar injection of crewed spacecraft and landers. Its first test flight is expected before 2027.
The technological readiness is genuine. After Chang’e-6, there is little doubt that CNSA can navigate, land, and operate on the lunar surface. The remaining challenges — life support for crewed transit, surface EVA capability, abort options, and the integration of all these systems into a single crewed mission — are difficult but not conceptually different from problems that NASA solved in the 1960s.
Whether the timeline holds depends on funding, hardware development progress, and the political commitment to sustain it through the remainder of the decade. Based on the trajectory of the past five years, there is no obvious reason to assume those factors will not hold. For a parallel look at how European commercial actors are approaching the same lunar south pole from a very different starting position, see Venturi MONA LUNA: Europe’s first commercial lunar rover.