NASA must be really worried now! China is conducting a major special project review, preparing to mine asteroids!
On January 29, 2026, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation officially disclosed to the public that it will launch a major special project named "Tiangong Kaiwu" during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. The core objective of this plan is to systematically layout capabilities for space resource development, including building ground support systems and on-orbit experimental platforms, and focusing on key technologies such as small celestial body resource exploration, intelligent autonomous mining, low-cost space transportation, and in-orbit resource processing.
This time, it's not just empty slogans, but the real start of bringing "space mining" from science fiction into engineering drawings. For NASA, which has long dominated deep space exploration, this is undoubtedly a practical strategic alarm bell.
Why now? The answer lies in the resources and orbital advantages. Near-Earth asteroids are rich in platinum group metals, water ice, and even rare earth elements. These resources can not only support deep space missions but may also form a new space economy chain in the future. The United States passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act in 2015, granting companies the right to use extraterrestrial resources; Luxembourg, the UAE, and other countries have also begun to make their moves. However, so far, there are few countries with complete technical chains capable of achieving a closed-loop operation from exploration to mining and return.
The "Tiangong Kaiwu" project proposed by China precisely targets the most difficult parts of this closed loop. For example, "intelligent autonomous mining"—which means that robots can independently complete complex operations such as drilling, screening, and loading even in environments where communication delays can last several minutes or longer. Another example is "low-cost transfer transportation," directly addressing the current biggest bottleneck in deep space missions: launch and fuel costs. If China can significantly reduce the unit mass transportation cost through reusable rockets, on-orbit refueling, or electric propulsion systems, its cost-effectiveness advantage in the space resource competition will quickly become apparent.
Another key detail is the timing window. The "14th Five-Year Plan" period is a critical phase for China's crewed moon landing and lunar research station construction. The Chang'e 6, 7, and 8 missions have clearly included in-situ utilization experiments of lunar soil, and "Tiangong Kaiwu" may be a technological extension of these missions. In other words, China is not waiting until after a successful moon landing to consider mining, but is advancing simultaneously—using the Moon and near-Earth asteroids as dual test sites to accelerate technological iteration.
In contrast, although NASA's "Artemis" program has grand ambitions, it is constrained by budget fluctuations, political cycles, and the uncertainty of commercial cooperation, resulting in unstable progress. More importantly, NASA still follows a scientific exploration-oriented logic and has not yet established a national-level space resource development engineering system. Although private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are eager to get involved, they lack unified standards and infrastructure support, making it difficult to achieve scale effects in the short term.
Over the next five years, we may not see Chinese spacecraft transporting ores from asteroids immediately, but breakthroughs in key technologies, the completion of ground simulation systems, and coordinated verification with lunar bases will determine who can truly "mine" in the 2030s. By then, the rules of the space race may have quietly changed.
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1855636449022976/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author.