Special to CosmicTribune.com, April 15, 2026

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

A recent Chinese engineering journal article provides more insights into China’s “Lanyue” manned Moon landing, which uses a specific Russian-inspired design that could in some circumstances prove hazardous to future residents of the lunar South Pole.

This is important because both the United States and China have targeted the lunar South Pole for early Moon Base building, as that region holds the greatest chance for finding lunar water ice — regarded as an early essential building block that will enable greater human settlement, exploitation of the Moon’s resources and even the production of fuels to power rockets to Mars.

“The lunar South Pole, for example, is about the size of the state of Virginia,” stated National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Moon Base Executive Carlos Galan-Garcia, during the March 24 “Ignition” briefings on NASA’s future plans under new Administrator Jared Isaacman.

Virginia has 39,490 square miles of land, perhaps sufficient for China and the United States to choose landing sites that meet requirements for de-confliction and that provide attractive resource potential.

But there are two issues that offer complications.

First, China has chosen a Moon landing vehicle design that uses a propulsion stage that is discarded close to its lunar landing point that will then crash into the surface of the Moon.

Secondly, U.S.-China relations on Earth are already strategically competitive and could tend toward actual warfare — this week over the U.S. military campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons potential, perhaps in a few years over the future of the democracy on Taiwan, and then over territories of Japan and the Philippines.

This means that should the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remain in charge, as we move into the 2030s, the incidence of conflict on Earth could give the CCP less incentive to consider the safety of non-Chinese inhabitants of the Moon.

Historically, China’s Lanyue Moon lander design has been influenced by the Soviet Union’s initial LK (Luniy Koryable), a one-Cosmonaut carrying lunar landing vehicle that never reached the Moon, succumbing to the failure of the Soviet Union’s massive N-1 manned lunar rocket program.

But the LK pioneered the use of a propulsion stage to enable partial descent to the Moon, and that was discarded prior to touchdown by the manned cabin, to crash into the lunar surface.

Like the LK, the Chinese Lanyue lunar lander docks in lunar orbit with a separate manned spaceship, for transfer of the Moon landing crew.

China is reported to have acquired the engine for the LK in the late 2000s from Ukraine, and since the early 1990s origins of China-Russia space cooperation, would have had plenty of opportunities to study remaining copies of the LK on display in Russia.

But additional insights into the Chinese decision to build a two-stage lunar landing vehicle have been provided by the March 2026 issue of the journal Chinese Space Science and Technology, in an article titled, “Research on Design and Key Technologies of Manned Lunar Landing and Takeoff System.”

The article was written by Wang Xiang of the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), and then Zhu Enyong, Liu Yang, and Hou Zhendong, with the Beijing Spacecraft Overall Design Department, also affiliated with CAST.

It is very likely that the authors were involved in the design of the Lanyue Moon lander.

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  China’s Moon lander could endanger U.S. lunar sites