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China has now shown, step by step, how it plans to put its first astronauts on the Moon. At the 7th Manned Space Symposium in Beijing on October 31, 2026, Wang Xiang, deputy chief designer of China's human spaceflight programme and chief designer of its lunar programme, set out an architecture with an unusually plain name: "two launches, lunar orbit rendezvous." The goal, restated at the symposium, is a crewed landing before 2030 — which would make China only the second country, after the United States, to land people on the Moon.
According to reports from CGTN, drawing on Xinhua, and The Express Tribune, also drawing on Xinhua, the plan uses two Long March 10 rockets, launched separately from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan island. One carries the Lanyue lunar lander — the name means "embracing the Moon" — and the other carries the Mengzhou crew spacecraft, meaning "dream vessel," with three astronauts aboard.
How the mission works, step by step
The two spacecraft travel separately toward the Moon and meet in lunar orbit, where they rendezvous and dock. Two of the three astronauts then transfer from Mengzhou into Lanyue, which carries them down to the surface, while the third stays in orbit aboard Mengzhou to support the landing crew. On the surface, the landing pair will drive a small rover called Tansuo, collect samples and run experiments, before returning to Lanyue, lifting off, and docking again with Mengzhou for the journey home.
Two other pieces of hardware complete the picture: the Wangyu lunar spacesuit for surface work, and the Tansuo crewed rover. China has not said which of the two launches flies first, how long the crew will spend on the surface, or given a specific launch date — "before 2030" remains the target, and any date circulating online should be treated as unofficial until China confirms it.
Why two rockets instead of one
Splitting the mission across two launches is a deliberate trade-off. A single rocket big enough to carry crew, lander and return fuel in one shot would need to be enormous; two Long March 10 launches let China reuse one rocket design for both halves of the job and assemble the mission in lunar orbit instead. The price is precision: two spacecraft launched days apart must find each other around the Moon, dock flawlessly, and then separate again — with a crew's lives depending on every step. It is the same lunar-orbit-rendezvous logic NASA used for Apollo, updated for a programme that has never flown people beyond Earth orbit.
Robots go first. Reports citing the China Manned Space Agency and SpaceNews say an uncrewed Lanyue flight and a full uncrewed rehearsal of the landing are planned before any astronaut attempts it. That sequence — verify the rocket, fly the lander empty, rehearse the whole landing empty — is how China has approached its robotic Chang'e programme, which has already landed on the Moon several times, including on the far side. The crewed programme is building on that record, not starting from scratch.
What to watch next
The milestones to watch are concrete: a Long March 10 verification flight, the first flights of Mengzhou and Lanyue, the standalone Lanyue mission, the uncrewed landing rehearsal, and the robotic Chang'e-7 mission. A low-altitude Long March 10 test stage flight from Wenchang, paired with a maximum-dynamic-pressure abort test of Mengzhou, already took place on February 11, 2026. Each of those steps, if it slips, pushes the "before 2030" goal with it.
China's announcement does not change the race so much as clarify it. The United States, through Artemis, is also aiming to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and both programmes now have public architectures to be judged against. China's is simpler to describe than most space plans — two rockets, one meeting in lunar orbit, two footprints on the surface — and that simplicity is the point. The next few years will show whether the hardware can match the diagram.