Mars

TL;DR China’s space programme in 2026 is one of the most consistently executed national space efforts in history. Where Western programmes have lurched between budgets and political cycles, China’s CNSA has shipped roughly what it announced, on roughly the timelines it announced. The Tiangong space station is fully operational, continuously crewed, and has hosted both domestic and international experiments. The Chang’e lunar series has progressed from sample return (Chang’e 5, 6) to the precursors of a crewed lunar landing programme planned before 2030. China has now returned samples from both the near and far sides of the Moon - the only nation to have done so. The lunar plan centres on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) - a long-term, China-led, multinational lunar surface base, with crewed landings as a milestone rather than the goal. Mars sample return, deep-space exploration, and a permanent lunar presence are all on a credible timeline. The realistic 2030 picture is two distinct, durable lunar architectures - American and Chinese - running in parallel. Why It Is Worth Looking Carefully It is easy in Western coverage to treat China’s space programme as a backdrop to the Artemis story. That undersells what is actually happening. ...

A few weeks ago, four astronauts came home from the Moon for the first time since 1972. Artemis II splashed down on April 11, 2026, after a nine-day flight that took its crew further from Earth than any human has ever travelled - 252,756 miles, a new record set by Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. It is the clearest signal yet that human spaceflight has stopped being a thing of the past and started being a thing of the near future again. But the headline mission is only one piece of a much larger picture. The decade we are living in is shaping up to be the most consequential one for crewed space travel since Apollo - and unlike the 1960s, this time it is not a single government driving it. ...