Within 4 or 5 years, humanity will go where it’s never gone before: the far side of the moon. This dark side—forever facing away from us—has long been a mystery. No human-made object has ever touched its surface. The mission will be a marvel of engineering. It will involve a rocket that weighs hundreds of tons (traveling almost 250,000 miles), a robot lander, and an unmanned lunar rover that will use sensors, cameras, and an infrared spectrometer to uncover billion-year-old secrets from the soil. The mission also might scout the moon’s supply of helium-3—a promising material for fusion energy. And the nation planting its starry flag on this historic trip will be the People’s Republic of China.

After years of investment and strategy, China is well on its way to becoming a space superpower—and maybe even a dominant one. The Chang’e 4 lunar mission is just one example of its scope and ambition for turning space into an important civilian and military domain. Now, satellites guide Chinese aircraft, missiles, and drones, while watching over crop yields and foreign military bases. The growing number of missions involving Chinese rockets and taikonauts are a source of immense national pride. It gives China legitimacy in an area that is associated with great power.

China’s estimated space budget is still dwarfed by NASA’s, which is $19.3 billion for this year alone. But China’s making the most of its outlay. This past year, it had 19 successful space launches—the second-highest number behind Russia’s 26, and ahead of America’s 18 and Europe’s 12. The decades ahead will see a range of Chinese missions that will match—and maybe even surpass—previous NASA exploits, including quantum communications satellites and a crewed mission to the moon in the early 2030s.

By landing on the moon, China isn’t just joining an exclusive two-nation club. It is also redefining what space means—militarily, economically, and politically—in the 21st century. There are plans for heavy-lift rockets, manned space stations, and one of the world’s largest satellite-imaging and -navigation networks. Meanwhile the U.S.?—particularly where human spaceflight is concerned—is hardly moving at all. As in the U.S. space marketplace, China relies on many state-linked aerospace companies working with its China National Space Administration (CNSA) to perform a dual role of supporting its military.

Such interconnectedness goes back to the beginnings of China’s rocket age and, ironically, to American soil. The man considered the father of Chinese rocketry is Qian Xuesen. A Chinese national, Qian had attended MIT in 1935, went to work on the Manhattan Project, and later became a co-founder of Caltech’s famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But during the Joseph McCarthy era, he was accused of being a communist sympathizer, put under house arrest for five years, and, in 1955, he returned to China. There he was greeted as a hero. He later developed China’s ballistic-missile and space-rocket programs. In fact, China still relies on the Long March rockets he helped develop to launch its space systems.

Starting in the ’80s, China put up sophisticated communications and intelligence satellites, and offered cheap satellite-launch services to other nations. It began a taikonaut (a mashup of the Mandarin word for “outer space” and “naut,” which is Greek for “sailor”) training program, and started building out manned mission capsules and space planes. With the launch of its manned Shenzhou 5, which carried taikonaut Yang Liwei into space for 21 hours in 2003, China’s space race began to hit its marks. From there, China made rapid leaps: multiple crewed missions, spacewalks, and, in 2011, the launch of Tiangong-1, a two-person space lab. Early next year, it will launch its first-generation cargo ship, Tianzhou-1, which means “­heavenly vessel.” The ship will dock with an existing Chinese space lab and bring ­supplies for science experiments.

As the U.S. and Soviet Union learned in the 1960s and ’70s, showcasing capability in space often translates to influence on the ground. The military benefits of going to the moon are zero, but the geopolitical effects are real.

China is also playing geopolitics with nation states that aren’t always willing to be aligned with Washington’s self-interests. It has been offering cheap and easy access to space, launching satellites for countries like Venezuela, Laos, Nigeria, and Belarus. Pakistan has used China’s military-grade satellite-navigation ­system, suggesting that China will also allow use of space-derived intelligence as part of ­future alliance building.

And if it continues its pace, China will launch its experimental Tiangong-2 space lab later this year, followed by a crew that will dock there and test technologies critical for building a permanent manned outpost in orbit. The first module of that outpost—Tiangong-3—is China’s highest- profile project. It is expected to lift off in 2022, marking a new era of Chinese space research. Tiangong-3 will be able to support three taikonauts, in addition to a bevy of scientific research. Notably, CNSA has already rolled out the welcome mat to other countries, offering the opportunity to place experiments, and astronauts, aboard.

Just as in the Cold War, there is also the possibility that space activities could yield more peace, not less. As China’s military and civilian dependence on space begins to mirror that of America’s, the hazard-filled nature of space operations creates an incentive for both nations—along with ­other space actors—to a maintain at least an uneasy cooperation. Global reliance on the space-based communications and navigation that power our digital age means that America and China will have to work together to draw up the rules for the crowded new space age.