[4] Since at least August 2021, Western news media has reported that China's main spacecraft contractor was working on a human-rated landing system for lunar missions.

[5] On 12 July 2023, at the 9th China (International) Commercial Aerospace Forum in Wuhan, Hubei province, Zhang Hailian, a deputy chief designer with the CMSA, publicly introduced a preliminary plan to land two astronauts on the Moon by the year 2030.

Under this plan, the astronauts will conduct scientific work upon landing on the Moon, including the collection of lunar rock and regolith samples.

[1] The preliminary plan describes a 'landing segment' that consists of a new lunar-lander attached to a propulsion stage which together are to be launched autonomously into a trans-lunar injection (TLI) orbit by the under-development Long March 10 rocket.

On 24 April 2024, Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), stated that the initial development of various products for China's lunar missions, including the Lanyue lander, is complete; according to Lin, mechanical and thermal articles for the lander and other mission segments have been constructed and the requisite rocket engines are undergoing hot fire tests.

Lin further elaborated that prototype production and tests are in full swing and that the crewed lunar exploration launch site is currently under construction near the existing coastal Wenchang spaceport in Hainan province.

[6] On 29 October 2024, CMSA announced that a separation test for the two modules of the landing system (presumably the lander and its propulsion stage) had been carried out.

[2] The physical model of the under-development lander, when considered together with the presentation by Zhang Hailian on 12 July 2023, suggests the future spacecraft will have the following components: four 7500-newton main engines, numerous attitude-control thrusters for precise maneuvering, a stowed lunar rover capable of carrying two astronauts, docking mechanisms (for docking with the Mengzhou spacecraft), a crew hatch (for EVAs), a ladder attached to one of the landing legs, two solar arrays, various antennaes and sensors.

CMSA previously issued an open call to private, public, and educational institutions to submit development plans for the future lunar rover; according to CMSA, fourteen groups submitted proposals in response to the open solicitation and eleven of the fourteen proposals advanced to the expert-review stage.

[10] Survey of journal literature reveals that the planned lunar rover may incorporate "differential-braking" and "off-ground detection" technologies to enhance its anti-slip and steering-stability characteristics during high-speed traverse.

It then will await a lunar orbit rendezvous with and docking by the separately launched Mengzhou spacecraft (formerly known as the next-generation crewed spacecraft, the analog to the Apollo program's Apollo command and service module) whereupon two astronauts will transfer to the lander, undock from Mengzhou, and maneuver the landing segment for a lunar-landing attempt.

During the previously-cited 2023 aerospace forum in Wuhan, Zhang Hailian also stated that a lunar surface-EVA spacesuit with an endurance period of no less than eight hours is currently under development.

[13] Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have begun site selection research ("suggestions") for the anticipated crewed lunar exploration program.

Numerous criteria, intended to maximize mission scientific value while taking into account crew safety and engineering feasibility, were considered by the team.

[17] The patched-conic method essentially seeks to "patch" together two (Keplerian) two-body ellipses (the conics) at a point of intersection defined by the Moon's gravitational sphere of influence, while taking into account the various physical constraints.

The method starts by calculating an initial simple two-body Earth-spacecraft ellipse and using it to propagate the spacecraft's position to a point within the Moon's PTS (the spacecraft's pseudostate), next the approximate restricted three-body solution is applied and the pseudostate is backward propagated to a point on the surface of the Laplace sphere, which defines the beginning of the Moon's gravitational sphere of influence, and finally a two-body Moon-spacecraft conic is calculated and the spacecraft location is forward propagated from the surface of the Laplace sphere to an arbitrary perilune point.