China's First Moon Crew Will Be Three, With Two Walking on the Surface: Beijing Lays Out the 2030 Plan
At a spaceflight conference in Beijing on October 31, chief designer Wang Xiang gave the most detailed public account yet of China's first crewed lunar landing: a crew of three, two of them walking on the moon before 2030, launched on two Long March 10 rockets in a 'two launches, one landing' sequence.
The plan for putting boots on the moon has been public for years as a deadline — "before 2030." What China had not detailed, until this week, was the choreography: who goes, how many actually land, and how they get back. On October 31, at the Seventh Crewed Spaceflight Academic Conference held at Beihang University in Beijing, Wang Xiang — deputy chief designer of the crewed space program and chief designer of the lunar exploration project — laid it out.
The crew will number three, as the Global Times reported from the conference, and two of the three will descend to the lunar surface while the third remains in orbit. The mission profile is what engineers call a lunar-orbit rendezvous mode, and Wang described it in detail: "two launches, one landing." Two Long March 10 rockets fly separately. The first carries the lander into lunar orbit and waits. The second launches the crewed spacecraft, which docks with the lander in orbit around the moon; two astronauts then transfer into the lander, undock, and descend to the surface for scientific work. When the surface work is done, the lander's ascent stage lifts off and docks again with the waiting spacecraft in lunar orbit, and the crew rides that ship home to Earth.
The announcement was picked up across Chinese social media within hours, where accounts noted that Wang's dual title — running both the crewed program's design office and the lunar exploration project — makes him the single engineer accountable for the whole sequence. It lands in a week already saturated with space and Party anniversaries: the Fifth Plenum communiqué on Tuesday, the 90th anniversary of the Long March's completion, and a People's Daily video titled "The Communist Party fears not the hardship of the long expedition" all charting alongside it.
The two-launch architecture is a consequence of mass, not preference. No single Chinese rocket yet exists that can throw a lander-plus-crew-stack to the moon in one go — the Long March 10 is still in development — so the mission splits the payload, Apollo-style in logic though with the rendezvous happening around the moon rather than en route. That places the burden on orbital docking: the mission requires one docking in lunar orbit before descent and a second after the lander's ascent, both performed with crew in the loop.
For readers outside China, the timeline is the noteworthy part. NASA's Artemis II crewed flyby is slated for the coming years, with a crewed landing later in the decade; China's program now states a landing before 2030 with a specific crew size and flight profile — and, per Wang, development work "progressing steadily" on every component. If both programs hold their schedules, the second half of this decade will see the first crewed landings since 1972, and for the first time, two flags.
What Wang did not announce was the crew itself, or a firm mission date. Selection for China's fourth astronaut cohort — trained for the lunar missions — has been underway since 2024. The next milestone will be hardware: a Long March 10 test flight, which engineers and watchers of the program will be counting toward that 2030 deadline.