THE NEW SPACE RACE: As NASA faces cuts, China reveals ambitious plans for planetary exploration.

Space journalist Andrew Jones, who tracks China’s space program, shared some images with a few details. Among the planned missions are:

2028: Tianwen-3 mission to collect samples of Martian soil and rocks and return them to Earth
2029: Tianwen-4 mission to explore Jupiter and its moon Callisto
2030: Development of a large, ground-based habitat to simulate long-duration human spaceflight
2033: Mission to Venus that will return samples of its atmosphere to Earth
2038: Establishment of an autonomous Mars research station to study in-situ resource utilization
2039: Mission to Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, with a subsurface explorer for its ocean

It would be easy to dismiss these plans as fanciful, and indeed, only the first two missions have been formally approved by China’s central government. Some of the concepts are tremendously exciting, but others appear unrealistic. For example, it is unknown how thick Triton’s ice shell is, and designing a probe to burn through that ice to reach the ocean would be extremely challenging.

Nonetheless, this scope of missions reveals that China is planning to conduct an extensive program to explore Mars and beyond, something that has almost (but not completely) exclusively been the province of NASA historically.

They’re certainly ambitious.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Comparing China to NASA kind of misses the point, when we have SpaceX.