The Far Side

On 25 June 2024, a capsule parachuted into Inner Mongolia carrying 1,935 grams of lunar rock, the first material ever returned from the far side of the Moon.^[1] The Chang’e-6 mission had landed in the South Pole–Aitken Basin, the oldest and largest impact scar on the Moon, and brought back a piece of it. No other space agency had done it, or has since.

It was not a one-off. Chang’e-5 had already returned about 1,731 grams from the near side in December 2020, the first lunar samples anyone had collected since 1976, ending a 44-year drought, and those samples rewrote the Moon’s volcanic history, dating to a surprisingly young two billion years.^[3][4] Chang’e-7 and -8 will follow to the lunar south pole later this decade, prospecting for water ice and testing how to use local resources.^[1]

Rock from the far side of the Moon; a fleck of an asteroid; and, perhaps before anyone else, a piece of Mars. The pacesetter now wears a Chinese flag.

Past the Moon

The ambition runs to the planets. After Tianwen-1 delivered an orbiter and the Zhurong rover to Mars in 2021, Tianwen-2 launched in May 2025 to collect a sample from a near-Earth asteroid, Kamo’oalewa, and return it before heading on to a comet.^[2] The headline act is Tianwen-3, a Mars sample-return mission planned for around 2028, which, if it holds, could bring Martian material to Earth before the repeatedly delayed NASA-ESA effort.^[1]

Two honest caveats. The Tianwen-3 date is variously given as 2028 to 2030, and the “before NASA” claim depends on both programmes’ schedules, so it is a credible prospect rather than a certainty. The masses and dates above, by contrast, are firm and officially recorded.

Reading it as an investor

Robotic deep-space exploration is the arena where China has most clearly moved from catching up to setting the pace, and while the missions themselves are state science rather than commercial ventures, the capability they demonstrate is the point. Precision landing, autonomous sample collection, ascent from another world and deep-space navigation are exactly the hard skills that underpin any future off-world economy, and China is now practising them at the frontier. We read the Chang’e and Tianwen programmes as a national capability statement, proof that on the hardest robotic missions, the country is no longer following anyone’s lead.