China National Space Administration

国家航天局

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) is the government agency responsible for managing China's civil space activities and for international space cooperation. It is a national bureau under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. CNSA was founded in 1993 and is headquartered at No. A8 Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing. Its listed functions are formulating space-industry policy, regulations and development plans, organising major space projects, approving and supervising civil space-science projects, and representing the Chinese government in international space cooperation. Its Administrator is Shan Zhongde and its Chief Engineer is Li Guoping. Directly affiliated units include the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center, established in 2004 to carry out overall engineering and management of the lunar programme, and the Earth Observation and Data Center, established in 2010.

CNSA's lunar and planetary missions have put several robotic systems on other worlds; the spacecraft are built mainly by CASC academies. Chang'e-3 landed the Yutu rover on 14 December 2013. It was the first lunar soft landing since 1976, and Yutu travelled 114 m before it stopped in July 2016. Chang'e-4 launched on 7 December 2018 and on 3 January 2019 made the first soft landing on the lunar far side, deploying the Yutu-2 rover. Tianwen-1 launched on 23 July 2020 and soft-landed on Mars on 14 May 2021. Its Zhurong rover was deployed on 22 May 2021 and worked for more than 347 sols against a 90-sol design life before hibernating in May 2022. Chang'e-6 launched on 3 May 2024 and landed on the far side on 1 June 2024. Its lander used a robotic scoop and drill to collect 1,935.3 g of samples, the first ever returned from the far side.

The agency's current robotic programme is focused on the lunar south pole. Chang'e-7 aims to master high-precision soft landing, legged walking, lunar-surface hopping and exploration of permanently shadowed craters. It combines orbiting, landing, roving and hopping, and it launched on a Long March 5 from Wenchang on 24 August 2026 (UTC) with an orbiter, lander, rover and hopping probe. Chang'e-8, planned for around 2029 and targeting the Leibniz-beta plateau, will include a lander, a rover and a robot. It offers 200 kg of payload capacity to international partners. On 24 April 2025, CNSA selected 10 Chang'e-8 cooperation projects from 11 countries and regions and one international organisation. They include a multifunctional lunar-surface operation robot and mobile charging station from HKUST and PolyU, a Pakistani lunar rover, and intelligent exploration robots for challenging environments led by Turkey's Middle East Technical University with STAR.VISION and Zhejiang University. These missions are precursors to the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) that China leads. CNSA has also sent Tianwen-2 to the near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa.