Other Plans to Launch China's Crewed Lunar Missions
Meanwhile, hardware to put taikonauts on the Moon is already flying and landing.
China will land at least two taikonauts on the Moon around 2029, having announced plans to do so in 2023. Before plans to do so were approved, a few other rockets were vying to launch the nation’s historic program, with spacecraft and rockets managing to reutilize existing hardware.
Selecting the Long March 10
For sending crewed missions to the Moon, a capable launch vehicle was needed, and China’s primary launch vehicle designers proposed at least three for its current mission plans, with one from an earlier era of the program too.
China’s most well-known lunar rocket plans are those of the Long March 10 series, with the tri-core Long March 10 and Long March 10A, from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), which won out against the others. The towering Long March 10 stands 93.2 meters tall, with all stages being 5 meters in diameter, and weighing up to 2,189,000 kilograms fully fuelled. At liftoff, twenty-one YF-100K’s generate a combined thrust of 2,676 tons of thrust, seven YF-100K’s on each first-stage booster producing 892 tons of thrust, burning rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen. Later into flight, the second-stage will feature two YF-100M engines capable of producing 298 tons of thrust (from burning rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen), followed by the third-stage using three YF-75E engines producing 28 tons of thrust, although using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. All of this results in a rocket able to lift 27,000 kilograms to a lunar transfer or 70,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit.
Meanwhile, the shorter Long March 10A is about 67 meters tall with a diameter of 5 meters, with a possible fairing diameter of up to 6.2 meters, which will see it weigh 740,000 kilograms while fully fuelled with rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen. Powering the two-stages will be seven YF-100K’s on the first-stage to produce 892 tons, with a single YF-100M engine producing 149 tons of thrust for the second-stage. This allows the launch vehicle to carry about 18,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit.
Currently, the Long March 10A is set to debut in early 2026, with the Long March 10 following in late 2026 or early 2027.
A similar proposal competing against CALT’s came from the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) with three rocket designs. The first would utilize four YF-100K and two YF-115 engines in a 3.8-meter-diameter two-stage vehicle (this would later become the Long March 12), another would have three 3.8-meter-wide first-stage boosters, using the YF-100K again, and a larger second-stage using an unspecified engine (probably the YF-100M), while the third would utilize five first-stage boosters, again using the YF-100K and 3.8 meters in diameter but lengthened, and an even larger second-stage with a third-stage as well.
The three-core design would have been used as an equivalent to the Long March 10A, while sending payloads of up to 28,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, for launching Mengzhou missions to the Tiangong Space Station and for tests of Lanyue in Earth orbit. Meanwhile, the five-core rocket would have replaced the Long March 10 in the lunar mission architecture, while also sending up to 70,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit.
Alongside the more conventional plans, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) was proposing a monstrous solid-fuelled launch vehicle in the same payload class as the Long March 10. That vehicle would have utilized three four-meter-diameter solid rocket motors, generating about 1,000 tons of thrust each, to carry itself off the launch pad and into orbit. Testing of necessary motors was outlined in 2017, while gradually scaled-up motor tests were conducted in 2020 and 2021.
It’s unclear how the development of the motors is going, as of 2021 they were still planned to be used for a lunar launch vehicle, but ExPace, a commercial launch provider subsidiary under CASIC, has plans with its Kuaizhou series of rockets for single-core and five-core launch vehicles using the motors, carrying 30,000 and 70,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit, respectively.
Before the above three designs, and worthy of a brief mention, is that of the old Long March 9, before its reuse overhaul. Through the second half of the 2010s, the Long March 9 was planned to be similar in capability to NASA’s Space Launch System ‘Block 2’ but with no solid fuel in its four boosters, lofting 140,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit with enough payload capacity towards the Moon, about 50,000 kilograms, for an Apollo-like lunar mission architecture. That design was approved for development in the opening months of 2021, before it was decided that two smaller rockets would fly crewed lunar missions while the Long March 9 would be largely focused on building Space-Based Solar Power stations, debuting a few years into the 2030s (far behind goals of a 2029 crewed lunar landing).
So, why did the CALT’s designs win out over those from SAST and CASIC? Comparing the designs and considering the hardware needed for development, CALT’s proposal needed fewer newer parts while being more uniform overall, with all of its stages and two boosters utilizing a 5-meter diameter, requiring less structural reinforcements, and utilizing improved designs of existing hardware.
CASIC’s designs would have required developing some massive solid rocket motors, while SAST’s has a sizeable diameter change atop of a central booster, which would have four others hanging off the side of it, requiring a significant amount of structural reinforcement. Alongside that, SAST was looking to develop three rockets for what CALT and CASIC could do with two.
Step-by-step hardware toward the Moon
Presently, the Long March 10A is currently a few months away from its debut flight, with its larger triple-core cousin, the Long March 10, about a year away. To ensure maximum success from the get-go with the launch vehicles for the crewed lunar program, their engines will need to fly elsewhere first.
Gaining the necessary flight data, the YF-100K engines are currently flying on the Long March 12 rocket, four at a time, with eight flown so far. Meanwhile, the third-stage engine of the Long March 10, designated the YF-75H or 75DA, currently has two propelling the second-stage of the Long March 8A, with six having flown to date. Both of those launch vehicles have multiple more flights in various stages of production to gather even more flight data before the Long March 10 series vehicles fly.
Of course, some tests cannot be done by flying a few engines at a time. The static fire back on August 15th, with the Long March 10 series static fire test article was one such instance, with seven YF-100K engines firing up for about thirty seconds. That test provided key data for firing up the group of engines simultaneously, along with verifying the design of the rocket’s launch pads’ flame trench. Mengzhou’s launch pad abort test at Jiuquan was another, integrating a basically complete launch abort system and capsule after a series of individual tests.
Likewise to the above paragraph, testing of other hardware cannot be done outside of specialised locations. For the propulsion module of the Lanyue lunar lander, its YF-58-1 engine has to be tested in a purpose-built test facility, the Tongchuan Test Center (铜川试验中心). Similarly, it is difficult to test lunar-gravity landing profiles in Earth-gravity, requiring Lanyue to be attached to an extraterrestrial gravity simulator.
Similarly to the Long March 10 series of rockets, Lanyue also has its engine, the YF-36, flying elsewhere. Previously, the YF-36 engine has supported the landings of Chang’e 3, Chang’e 4, Chang’e 5, and Chang’e 6, alongside the Mars landing of Tianwen-1 with Zhurong. As such, a plethora of data is available to understand how the engine acts in the lunar environment, both during descent and after having sat on the surface for extended periods of time.
As is evident above, where possible, China’s crewed lunar landing program is reutilizing existing hardware to bring in existing reliability to the program, alongside speeding up the development schedule. This is somewhat similar to what was done with the U.S. Space Launch System and Orion, reusing the Space Shuttle’s main engines, orbital maneuvering thrusters, and solid rocket boosters, albeit much more extensively.
This article was written to highlight two parts of China’s lunar program that I have seen less discussed; hopefully, it does that.
Fascinating and detailed piece, thanks!