Oct. 1, 2049, the centennial of the People’s Republic of China, and celebrations are truly otherworldly. Chinese researchers are marking the occasion at the nation’s permanent bases on the moon, including a flagship station that opened near the lunar south pole in the 2030s. The outposts are part of the country’s wide-scale investment in space infrastructure that includes orbital data centers, solar power stations and navigation satellites. Chinese astronauts are even commemorating the anniversary from Mars, achieving a decades-in-the-works goal to send a crewed mission to the red planet by midcentury.

At least, that’s the future envisioned by President Xi Jinping and other officials as they try to surpass the US in today’s space race, a competition that’s mostly centered on which superpower will send people to the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. NASA is targeting 2028, before the China Manned Space Agency’s goal of doing so by 2030. The US’s plans, however, hinge on spacecraft made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which face daunting engineering challenges, prompting critics such as Jim Bridenstine, NASA chief during President Donald Trump’s first administration, to warn that the US is at risk of ceding its lead to China.

Beating the US would provide a symbolic boost for Beijing’s global standing, says Lincoln Hines, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. China could “use it as evidence that it is the new technological superpower on the block,” he says, “which would be a domestic propaganda coup” for the Chinese Communist Party.

China, though, is looking for more than public-relations victories. Its goal is to be a “space hegemon” by the 2040s, says Kathleen Curlee, a senior research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. That means it wants to be capable of setting the agenda and rules for activity in cislunar space, the vast area from the edge of Earth’s atmosphere to the surface of the moon.

Although the targets are ambitious, China’s engineers have a solid off-planet track record. The nation has made major strides this century closing the gap with NASA. Yang Liwei became China’s first man to go to space, in 2003; Liu Yang was China’s first woman to go, in 2012. In total, China has sent dozens of astronauts to space, many to Tiangong, the permanent, crewed orbital station China completed in 2022 in response to the US denying it a role at the International Space Station.

China has mostly caught up to the US in deeper space too, landing on the moon in 2013 with the robotic Chang’e 3 spacecraft. In 2019 the nation became the first to achieve the even more difficult task of landing on the moon’s far side, something the US hopes to do for the first time next year. An uncrewed Chinese craft touched down on Mars in 2021, in time to mark the CCP’s 100th birthday. While NASA tends to favor more ambitious and complicated plans, the Chinese are “much better” at doing things on time and on budget, says Ehud Behar, an astrophysicist at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Shan Zhongde, head of the Chinese equivalent of NASA, in April shared some of the country’s other space priorities, including reusable-rocket development, crewed spaceflight missions, lunar and planetary exploration, and Starlink-like satellite internet services. The China National Space Administration chief also said Beijing wants to work on planetary defense, using assets in space to protect Earth from killer asteroids.

Although China says its ambitions are to further science and international cooperation, the race to own space is also part of the People’s Liberation Army’s long-term military plans. China in 2007 became only the third country, after the US and Soviet Union, to test an antisatellite weapon in space. In February 2026, China launched the fourth flight of a reusable experimental spacecraft that could be of military value thanks to its ability to release, dock and maneuver with objects such as satellites in low-Earth orbit, according to a report from the Secure World Foundation in Washington.

All this is raising alarms in Washington, where both major parties have warned about China seeking to deny the US access to places on the moon that could contain resources valuable for lunar habitation as well as for eventual travel to Mars. (The most important such resource would be ice, which, if it exists in large enough quantities near the poles, could in theory be used to make oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for rocket fuel.) Officials at the Pentagon are also becoming more outspoken about the threats of China in orbit. The PLA is “pursuing strategies to transform outer space from a civil commercial frontier into a fully contested battlespace,” the US Space Force said in a report published in April.

The world’s most successful space company has noticed China’s rapid ascent too. “To their credit, they have got an amazing space program,” SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc.-sponsored conference in September. SpaceX has used its Falcon 9 rockets to deploy more than 11,000 Starlink broadband satellites in low-Earth orbit and recorded a breakthrough in September when its Starship, the biggest rocket ever built, sent satellites to orbit for the first time.

State-owned and private-sector Chinese companies are making progress on efforts to build their own reusable rockets like SpaceX’s, with successful tests in 2026, and satellite networks. But while Johnsen is watching China’s progress, he’s pretty confident Musk’s company is still ahead. “I do think in the years to come we will see things but not on a Starship level anytime soon, let’s put it that way.”The pace will likely pick up in the next 25 years as China looks not just to match the US but to surpass it.

China’s plans include launching around 2028 the first mission to return samples from Mars. NASA also had plans for a Mars sample-return mission of its own, but the project was scrapped after expected costs soared.

Unlike their US counterparts who openly talk about a space race, Chinese experts play down suggestions of a competition. “Regarding the notion of a timeline to surpass the United States, the premise of a zero-sum ‘space race’ does not align with our strategic philosophy,” says Wang Dong, a professor in the School of International Studies at Peking University. “The idea of ‘winning’ in space completely misunderstands the aim of today’s exploration of space.”

The Chinese government sees space as integral to the country’s economic and geopolitical power, according to Namrata Goswami, author and space policy expert in the US. “The larger prize is first-mover advantage in the emerging cislunar economy,” she says. “Whoever establishes infrastructure early can influence technical standards, partnerships, resource extraction practices, transportation networks and eventually governance.”

Dominance in space could also help Chinese companies compete on Earth. “You have a massive advertising advantage,” says Dean Cheng, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. The pitch would be compelling: “Use the technology that’s good enough to support life on the moon for your infrastructure project in Bolivia, in Thailand, in Egypt.”