A new report warns that China's rapid and unrelenting growth within the space sector will see the country overtake the U.S. in the "new space race" to become the world's leading space-faring nation in as little as "five or 10 years," experts say.
The stark warning comes less than two weeks after a Senate Commerce Committee hearing discussed the increasing likelihood of China beating the U.S. in a race to return humans to the moon. During these talks, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told senators that "it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China's projected timeline," unless the recent record-breaking cuts to NASA's budget are reversed.
The 112-page document contains the most up-to-date information on China's various space assets and missions, including the country's new space station, its growing satellite megaconstellations and its plans to visit and colonize the moon.
"China is not only racing to catch up — it is setting pace, deregulating, and, at times, redefining what leadership looks like on and above Earth," researchers wrote in the report. "China's space ascendancy — propelled by disciplined policy, strategic investment, and sweeping technological gains — has fundamentally redrawn the domain in which global power is contested."
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One of the most worrying issues raised by the new report for the U.S. is the possibility that China will be the first nation to return humans to the moon, for the first time since 1972. While NASA's Artemis missions have been repeatedly delayed, partly due to recent issues with SpaceX's temperamental Starship rocket, China has continued to hit "major milestones" on its plan to land astronauts by 2030. These include mapping the lunar surface in record detail, returning historic lunar samples to Earth and building their own supersized rockets. (NASA is currently aiming to land astronauts on the moon by 2027.)
China is also planning to build a fully operational moon base, equipped with an autonomous nuclear reactor, by as early as 2035. This could help the nation stake its claim on valuable lunar mining materials and give them the edge in the race to eventually send humans to Mars, Live Science's sister site Space.com recently reported.
Another area where China is likely to dominate is in low-Earth orbit, thanks to its recently completed Tiangong space station, which will become the only major state-run space station in operation once the International Space Station (ISS) is decommissioned at the end of this decade. (NASA has no plans to replace the ISS directly, although a number of commercial ventures are pursuing plans for their own stations.)
China is also starting to build out its own satellite megaconstellations to rival SpaceX's rapidly expanding "Starlink" network. It's also planning to build an orbital solar power array and its own version of the James Webb Space Telescope in the near future.
On the ground, China now has six different operational spaceports, which will allow the country to rapidly increase the number of rockets it can launch in the coming years.
But perhaps the most alarming point for the U.S. is that the country is completing all these impressive tasks simultaneously. In other words, "China is living its Apollo, ISS, and commercial space eras all at once," the report authors wrote.
The secret to China's recent success is (unsurprisingly) increased funding, especially for commercial companies, which have been given special support from the government to aid the China National Space Administration (CNSA). For example, the country invested $2.86 billion in its commercial space ventures last year — more than 17 times the $164 million it spent in 2016, according to the report.
Another important factor has been China's willingness to work with other nations to achieve its goals, including Russia, India and Japan. This approach, dubbed the "Space Silk Road" initiative, has seen China set up over 80 projects with international partners so far, "eroding U.S. influence," the researchers wrote.
The report's co-author Jonathan Roll, a space policy analyst at Arizona State University, was particularly surprised by how quickly China's space capabilities have progressed since he first properly studied the topic in the early 2020s: "I thought I had a pretty good read on this when I was finishing grad school," Roll told Ars Technica. "[But the fact] that almost everything needed to be updated, or had changed three years later, was pretty scary."
Meanwhile, America's space ambitions have been hamstrung by the Trump administration, which has proposed cutting NASA's budget almost in half, putting multiple long-term missions in jeopardy and creating knock-on impacts in the commercial space industry.
"The United States is still ahead today in a lot of areas in space," Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told Ars Technica. "But the Chinese are advancing very quickly and poised to overtake us in the next five to 10 years if we don't do something."
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