China’s “two-launch” plan unveiled, global manned moon landing enters multi-route parallel era

Recently, the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Academic Conference held in Beijing revealed that China’s manned lunar landing mission will adopt the implementation route of “two launches and docking around the moon”. The disclosure of this plan has made the differences in the moon landing paths of different countries clearer.

The underlying ideas vary

The Space Launch System (SLS) self-developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the most powerful manned super-heavy launch vehicle currently in service. It was originally designed to deliver a manned spacecraft and the full payload of the moon landing on a single rocket, relying on its super large capacity to compress the on-orbit docking link. In 2026, NASA adjusted the mission sequence: Artemis 3, originally planned to carry out a manned lunar landing, was changed to low-Earth orbit rendezvous and docking technology verification, and the first manned lunar landing mission was postponed to Artemis 4 in 2028.

NASA's new plan does not pursue the tight rhythm of Apollo-style moon landings, but uses three independent launches, three suppliers, and serial releases to break up the risks. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman admitted that "what we have today is not enough to recreate Apollo 9." The essence of this route adjustment is to actively slow down in the face of hardware reality and exchange multiple launches for mission controllability.

Vladimir Solovyov, chief designer of the Russian Energy Rocket and Space Group, said that the cost of manned orbiting the moon is much higher than that of unmanned exploration. Under the tight budget situation, Russia’s choice is to retreat from comprehensive self-research to integration of existing technologies, and its goal has also shrunk from independent manned lunar landing to maintaining a sense of existence with the ability to orbit the moon. This is not a technical judgment priority, but a budgetary judgment priority.

European Space Agency (ESA) Administrator Joseph Aschbach said that the European Service Module powers the Orion spacecraft and is a key subsystem that allows astronauts to fly to the moon and back. The advantage of Europe using sub-systems in exchange for entry qualifications is that it does not have to bear the huge costs of super-heavy carriers and landers alone, but the price is that the pace is controlled by others.

China's publicized "two launches and lunar docking" plan will launch the lunar module and manned spacecraft into a lunar orbit in two phases. After rendezvous and docking in orbit, the astronauts will transfer to the lunar module and land on the lunar surface. It is different from Artemis' "one rocket with full payload", which does not require the development of a giant capacity rocket in one step; compared with the multiple assembly plan in low-Earth orbit, the docking link is placed in the lunar orbit to avoid a series of risks of long-term near-Earth on-orbit storage.

It can be seen that there is no distinction between different routes, but they are just choices made by different aerospace systems based on their own conditions.

There is no optimal solution to engineering trade-offs

The most acute manifestation of engineering trade-offs is not the route itself, but the risk judgment of key technologies. As a lander, SpaceX's "Starship" relies on low-temperature propellant refueling in orbit, so it requires multiple launches of supply spacecraft. Former astronaut Charlie Precott, a member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Group, put the number at 22 launches. SpaceX founder Elon Musk immediately retorted on social media: "That's too high. The actual number is more likely to be 6-8 times."

Precott's responsibility as a safety consultant is to keep an eye on the risk boundary, while Musk's judgment as the contractor leader is subject to schedule and cost pressures. Both have their own engineering rationale. In Artemis 3, NASA allowed Blue Origin's "Blue Moon" to bypass on-orbit refueling and instead use multiple launches and assembly in space. Artemis 3 is no longer designed as an isolated moon landing mission, but as the first exercise of a repeatable multi-launch operation mode. The cost is that the mission chain becomes longer, the interfaces increase, and the organizational complexity increases; the benefit is that each launch can be released or aborted independently, and astronauts do not have to wait in orbit for a lander that is not ready. On the balance of trade-offs, NASA chose to trade complexity for redundancy.

The Chinese plan is another trade-off: the mission chain is shorter than NASA's multi-launch architecture, but the fault tolerance space of each link is also narrower. It requires higher orbit entry and docking accuracy, spacecraft autonomous control capabilities, and astronauts' independent judgment and processing capabilities in the absence of external backup.

The manned moon landing competition is not just about technical indicators, but also the ability of a space system to invest stably in the long term.

Cooperation with strong technical attributes still exists

Valentin Uvarov, an academician of the Russian Space Academy, said during the 2026 Russian Space Forum that Russia, China and the United States have great potential for cooperation in the space field.

Sino-Russian lunar power station cooperation under the ILRS framework is supported by a memorandum of understanding. Lev Zelione, chief scientist of the Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that Russian and Chinese researchers are cooperating in comparative studies of lunar soil. ESA's European Service Module remains an irreplaceable propulsion and life support subsystem for the Orion spacecraft after NASA adjusted its "Gateway" program. The technical attributes of these cooperation are stronger than the strategic attributes, and they can often be advanced in the gaps between differences in governance frameworks.

However, the rules game has not been eliminated by technological cooperation, of which the "safe zone" controversy is the most representative. The Artemis Accords set up a safety zone around the landing site on the grounds of "avoiding harmful interference", with a proposed exclusion range of about 1 to 5 kilometers. Isaacman said in September 2026 that first-come-first-served zoning would significantly make it more difficult for latecomers to access surrounding sites. High-quality sites at the lunar south pole are already scarce, and the superposition of safe zones may significantly reduce the space for latecomers. Legal scholars have criticized that this mechanism uses procedural words to cover up substantive exclusive intentions, which may lead to de facto appropriation, which conflicts with the principle of non-appropriation of the Outer Space Treaty. The core of the dispute is that when the right to designate is in the hands of the first comer and high-quality sites are highly scarce, collision avoidance tools may become barriers to entry, which is difficult to bridge through engineering cooperation alone.

While various countries are advancing independent lunar landing plans and consolidating their own deep space capabilities, they are also exploring and negotiating relevant consensus on lunar governance. The moon landing is a long-term technical endurance race. Parallel exploration of different routes has also given rise to new collaboration and competition in the aerospace field - some technologies and scientific data can be shared, while core technologies such as heavy-duty carriers, in-situ resource utilization on the lunar surface, and deep space navigation are still the focus of competition among various countries. In the next few years, the test flights and verification progress of different plans will determine who can be the first to set foot on the lunar surface stably, ushering in an era of regular lunar exploration.

Reporter Yao Yian