In the US- and China-led race to get astronauts back on the moon, there is actually one common goal: establishing a sustainable, permanent, manned lunar base. But the two nations’ specific plans for achieving that moonshot are far from identical, with key differences that could dictate which country gets there first — and perhaps who controls the moon itself.
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) is aiming for a human landing no later than 2030. It plans to use its Mengzhou crew capsule and the Lanyue lunar lander, which will be launched separately on the Long March-10 rockets. Officials haven’t chosen a landing site yet, but CMSA appears to be zooming in on a relatively low-risk touchdown site near the equator on the moon’s Earth-facing side — similar to the approach used by NASA’s Apollo lunar program for its first manned lunar landing in 1969.
NASA, meanwhile, is pursuing a landing in 2028. Astronauts will launch to the moon in an Orion capsule atop a Space Launch System rocket and then be transported to the surface by either SpaceX’s Starship craft or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander as part of the agency’s Artemis IV mission.
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Unlike China’s path toward an Apollo-style, “safety first” plan, America’s astronauts would target more dangerous locations near the harder-to-reach, resource-rich lunar south pole. And both nations want this region to be the site of their manned outposts.
Two rival moon bases, one common goal
China eventually plans to establish the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a two-phase lunar base built in collaboration with Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos.
The first, unmanned phase of the ILRS will be led by two autonomous lunar landers, developed and operated by CMSA’s robotics-focused counterpart, the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
First, the planned Chang’e 7 mission, which will launch later this year, will land at Shackleton Crater at the South Pole to probe it for water ice and other resources that could be used to support the ILRS. Then, in 2028 or 2029, Chang’e 8 will visit the region to demonstrate important base-building capabilities, such as making bricks from lunar soil. Ultimately, such “in situ resource exploitation” could include processing the lunar polaris into potable water or even rocket fuel. The second ILRS phase can support human occupants for extended surface stays.
NASA’s planned outpost, tentatively called Artemis Base Camp, will be US-led, but will also include contributions from several other nations and a number of commercial partners. It will also be built in phases using a mix of robots and human astronauts. And it will, at least initially, be a mess: to talk to New York Times in February, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman noted that for perhaps a decade after its founding, Artemis Base Camp will look like a “futuristic junkyard with lots of landers and rovers around” before eventually gaining more “pretty cool infrastructure.”
A policy of duration
NASA has some ideas about what “cool infrastructure” it might put on the moon — specifically a fission reactor by 2030 — but has held off on most of the details, said Marcia Smith, a space policy analyst who heads SpacePolicyOnline.com. But perhaps the most important detail for Artemis Base Camp, she says, is not about a particular gadget or construction, but rather an alignment with official national policy.
The adaptation in question is in the NASA Authorization Act of 2026, which was passed March 4 by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and calls for the space agency to establish a “Lunar Surface Moon Base.”
During the committee’s deliberations, its chairman, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said the bill expressly requires NASA “to establish a permanent lunar base so that we can get there before China does.”
The directive carries considerable weight, says Smith. “Building a lunar base has been the stuff of science fiction for decades, but is now a stated goal of NASA,” she says, “and legislation is working its way through Congress.”
The law recognizes that it will be an incremental process, but “at what point it becomes a ‘moon base’ will undoubtedly be the subject of much debate in the space community,” Smith says, “especially if other countries like China do the same.”
Ultimately, establishing a “permanent” human presence on the moon is a very different task than the “permanence” in low Earth orbit that NASA and other space agencies have achieved via manned spacecraft such as the International Space Station (ISS), says Clive Neal, a longtime advocate of lunar exploration and professor of planetary geology at the University of Notre Dame.
“‘Permanent’ on the moon means we have a station on the lunar surface that always has a human there,” says Neal. The precedent is the ISS: maintained through international cooperation (but notably excluding China), the orbital facility has enabled a continuous human presence in space for more than 25 years.
But for the moon, “the first thing is to have a lunar port with a purpose-built landing and launch pad,” Neal says. “It must be robust and easy to repair, used over and over again without breaking down, and support a cadence of human and cargo-carrying vessels coming and going from the same location.”
From there, surface transport rovers will be critical. “It’s a staged but integrated infrastructure,” he says. “There is power, ports, logistics, resources and housing.”
And speaking of housing, “a tin can on the surface isn’t going to … be,” Neal adds. A habitat would likely need to be buried beneath lunar soil to protect its inhabitants from cosmic radiation, micrometeoroid impacts, and the intense thermal fluctuations associated with the week-long lunar day and night.
We’re here to stay – so stay away!
For Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, “permanence” on the moon does not necessarily mean a single inhabited structure planted in one place, but rather “the ability to maintain a continuous presence through regular missions, infrastructure build-up and ongoing surface operations.”
A better way to think of a moon base is as a network of systems, says Hanlon. And because these systems can’t all be packed together or right next to each other (missiles are best kept far away from nuclear reactors, for example), even a relatively small installation can have a fairly large operational footprint. In other words, permanence on the moon for any nation will not just be a matter of high-tech bricks and mortar, she says.
The basic legal document for anyone wishing to set up shop on the moon is the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The treaty effectively prohibits national appropriation or private ownership of the moon, favoring a “for all mankind” approach. However, loopholes exist that allow lunar explorers to establish “safety zones” to protect their work and themselves from potentially harmful interference from other lunar visiting parties. These zones will be operational buffers to minimize risk, says Hanlon, rather than explicit territorial claims. They could nevertheless prove to be exclusionary.
“It will be a test of governance,” she says. “The real question is whether multiple nations can operate side by side on the most valuable sites on the Moon without turning operational security into geopolitical exclusion.”
Complicating all of this is that the moon’s south pole is rugged and remote from more easily accessible areas, meaning there are surprisingly few places to build there. Several key conditions must match: terrain suitable for landing; nearly continuous sunlight for power; proximity to permanently shadowed craters that may contain water ice; and ideally the possibility of line-of-sight communication with Earth.
“These combinations only occur in limited places,” says Hanlon. “So the real issue is not whether there is space somewhere on the moon, but whether there is space in a handful of places that make sustained operations practical.
