China pledges to transform into world-leading space power, vows to develop space tourism

China's main space contractor vowed to develop space tourism in the next five years, state media has reported, as Beijing revs up its commercial spaceflight and deep space exploration ambitions amid a technology race with the US.

State-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said it would "achieve the flight operation of suborbital space tourism and gradually develop orbital space tourism," as well as "build a gigawatt-level space digital intelligence infrastructure", state broadcaster CCTV reported on Thursday.

China and the US are competing as they look to turn space exploration into a commercially viable business similar to civil aviation, as well as becoming the first to exploit the military and strategic advantages of space dominance. CASC has vowed to transform China into a "world-leading space power" by 2045.

Beijing's key bottleneck so far is its failure to complete a reusable rocket test. US rival SpaceX's Falcon 9 reusable rocket has allowed its subsidiary Starlink to achieve a near-monopoly on low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and it is also used for orbital space tourism.

Reusability is crucial to lowering the costs of rocket launches and making it cheaper to send satellites into space.

China achieved a record 93 space launches last year, according to official announcements, buoyed by its rapidly maturing commercial spaceflight startups.

However, China has repeatedly described SpaceX's monopoly on LEO satellites as a national security risk and is launching its own satellite constellations, which it hopes will number in the tens of thousands within the next decades.

‘Deep space exploration’

In late December, Chinese entities submitted filings with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) laying out plans to put about 200,000 satellites in orbit over the next 14 years. Two mega-constellations account for the vast majority, and the move would strategically reserve suborbital slots and frequencies for Beijing.

CASC's plans were announced after China inaugurated its first School of Interstellar Navigation housed in the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, aiming to foster the next generation of space talent in frontier fields including interstellar propulsion and deep space navigation.

The new institution signals China's ambitions to strategically transition from near-Earth orbit operations to deep space exploration, and will support China's planned lunar research station and efforts in detecting planets outside our solar system, according to a Xinhua report on the inauguration.

"The next 10 to 20 years will be a window for leapfrog development in China's interstellar navigation field. Original innovation in basic research and technological breakthroughs will reshape the pattern of deep space exploration," Xinhua wrote.

Thursday's CCTV report said CASC would also focus on breakthroughs in key technologies such as small celestial resource exploration and intelligent independent mining and step up monitoring of space debris and the formulation of international space traffic management rules.

China's Chang'e-6 lunar probe was the first spacecraft to bring back samples from the far side of the moon in 2024, and Beijing is actively setting international standards for spaceflight and space infrastructure to establish itself as a dominant space power.

The US faces intense competition this decade from China in its effort to return astronauts to the moon, where no humans have gone since the final US Apollo mission in 1972.