We tend to think the US is safely ahead in the new Moon race, but China has already put its Lanyue lander through simulated lunar landing and takeoff tests — then fired its Mengzhou crew capsule away from a Long March 10A prototype at maximum aerodynamic pressure, in an integrated abort-and-recovery demo that NASA’s expendable Space Launch System was never designed to match.

It is comfortable to assume that the United States is safely ahead in the return to the Moon. China’s recent run of hardware tests is a reason not to be too comfortable.

In the past year it has put a full-scale model of its Lanyue lunar lander through a simulated landing and takeoff, and it has fired its Mengzhou crew capsule clear of a rocket at the most punishing moment of ascent while also trying to recover the booster. Both are real milestones. The comparison with NASA that usually follows them needs to be made with some care.

A landing and takeoff, rehearsed on Earth

In August 2025, at a test site in Huailai County north-west of Beijing, the China Manned Space Agency ran the first integrated landing and ascent test of Lanyue, the lander meant to put Chinese astronauts on the surface around 2030.

It was done with a full-scale mockup, suspended from tethered towers that offset most of Earth’s gravity to mimic the Moon’s weaker pull, then lowered onto artificially cratered ground. The test checked the touchdown, the engine shutdown on contact, the climb back up, and the way the guidance, navigation and propulsion systems work together. It is the kind of unglamorous rehearsal that has to work long before anything is risked with people aboard.

An abort at maximum pressure, with a recovery attached

The capsule has been through two escape tests. A pad abort in June 2025 checked that Mengzhou could pull its crew clear of a stricken rocket sitting on the ground.

Then, in February 2026, came the harder one. From a Long March 10A test booster at Wenchang, the escape system fired about 65 seconds into flight, at roughly 11 kilometres up, at the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure, the moment in ascent when the air loads on a rocket peak and an abort is most demanding. The capsule separated and was carried clear. According to the engineers involved, the same flight also trialled recovering the first stage, which they described as the first time a single test had combined a max-Q escape with a booster recovery.

What NASA has, and has not, done

This is where the comparison has to be precise, because it is easy to overstate.

NASA has already demonstrated a max-Q abort of its crew capsule. In July 2019, the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system was fired during a test flight called Ascent Abort-2, near the point of maximum pressure and with the booster still burning, and it pulled the capsule away cleanly. The abort itself, in other words, is not something the United States never managed. It managed it first, more than six years before China.

What China added is the other half. Its February flight also attempted to recover the booster, and recovery is something NASA’s Space Launch System was never built to do, because that rocket is expendable and discarded on every flight. The novelty is not that China can abort at maximum pressure, which NASA showed in 2019, but that it folded an abort and a reusability trial into a single flight. That reflects where the two programmes differ by design, rather than a hole in NASA’s abort capability.

So who is ahead?

On the things that have actually flown, the United States is still in front. Artemis I sent an uncrewed Orion around the Moon and back in 2022, and a crewed flyby on Artemis II is next on the schedule. China has not yet flown its lunar capsule or its Moon rocket at all.

But “safely ahead” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. China’s tests are arriving steadily and close to schedule for a landing around 2030, while the American timeline has slipped repeatedly, with the Artemis III landing dependent on a lander and spacesuits still in development. The honest position is not that China leads, but that the American lead is narrower, and less secure, than the comfortable version suggests.

What to watch

The near-term markers are concrete. On the Chinese side, the first flights of the Long March 10A and an uncrewed Mengzhou, followed by the uncrewed and then crewed lunar missions that must come before any landing around 2030. On the American side, the crewed Artemis II flyby and the repeatedly delayed Artemis III landing.

Whichever way it runs, the tests of the past year have settled one thing. China is not making up the ground from a standing start. It is methodically clearing the same hurdles the United States is, and in at least one respect it has now done something the United States chose not to build its Moon rocket to do.