China's Moon-Mars ambitions were revealed in a white paper that details plans to land on the dark side of the moon and place a probe on Mars by the end of the decade.
Released by the information office of China's Cabinet, the white paper said the country plans a moon launch in 2018 and a commitment to send a probe to the red planet by 2020, said the Daily Mail.
While the United States and Russia have long histories in space, China has started to catch up over the past 13 years. The country sent a manned crew into space in 2003 and landed a rover on the moon in 2013.
Two Chinese astronauts returned to Earth safely last month after a one-month stay on the country's experimental space station Tiangong 2, the longest manned mission to date.
According to CNN, the deputy chief of the country's National Space Administration, Wu Yanhua, said China is still studying the possibility of sending a man to the moon, but now is focusing on robotic lunar missions.
While Wu underlined the country's plan to increase cooperation with other international space agencies, there are no plans to work with NASA, said CNN. The U.S. Congress banned such collaboration in 2011 because of national security concerns.
Chinese officials stressed that their space program is peaceful.
Former Congressman Robert Walker and University of California-Irvine Professor Peter Navarro co-authored a paper saying China and Russia are advancing "military-focused initiatives" in space, said Forbes.
"(China and Russia's aim to) develop weapons explicitly designed, as the Pentagon has noted, to deny, degrade, deceive, disrupt, or destroy America's eyes and ears in space," wrote Walker and Navarro, both space advisors for president-elect Donald Trump.
Walker told Forbes that Trump's administration would put a renewed emphasis on the country's space capabilities as vital to the military and intelligence gathering.
"Trump space policy puts a priority on reducing the vulnerability of our military space assets through use of multi-satellite constellations and new technology for servicing and refueling those constellations," said Walker.
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