China's national space agency is frustratingly secretive with specific technical details, but they're fairly open with mission goals, general technical details, and sharing of scientific discoveries.

China is already well in advance of Russia, sad to say. Russia's agency Roscosmos is largely coasting on Soviet-era technology. It's mostly due to budget problems. The longer it goes on, the more institutional knowledge is lost. Quality control is also a total shitshow. A good example is the Nauka docking incident where a new ISS module went out of control after docking, continually firing its thrusters and sending the ISS into an uncontrolled spin until the new module ran out of fuel.

If it weren't for SpaceX, I'd say that China's space program is already more advanced than the US's collective space program in its current state. It's very much a thing but the objective fact is that the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon spacecraft are incredible engineering feats. Highly capable, highly reliable, an excellent safety record for both. I loathe that company's ownership with every fibre of my being, but the actual scientists and engineers and technicians working there do know what they're doing.

The non-SpaceX side of American spaceflight is an absolute shambles. Explaining why in detail deserves an effortpost of its own. Here's the highlights.

• Blue Origin's brand-new New Glenn rocket exploded on its launch pad in one of the largest non-nuclear artificial explosions in history, wiping out its only launch pad in the process. The consensus is that it'll be a year before they rebuild the pad and its support equipment. Early public comments from Blue Origin management talk about an unspecified problem with the aft section of the first stage. This is bad news for the next item on this list.

• The Vulcan-Centaur made by ULA (a 50/50 shotgun wedding joint venture of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, long story) has had four flights, and in two of them, one of the side booster's nozzles exploded mid-flight in the same way. By pure dumb luck neither explosion caused a mission failure but the rocket is grounded until the problem is fixed. That rocket's problems may be doubled because it actually uses the same BE-4 engine as the New Glenn, supplied by Blue Origin. If the BE-4 engine was the cause of the New Glenn explosion, it will keep Vulcan-Centaur grounded even after the booster nozzle explosion issue is resolved. Fun fact: Vulcan-Centaur only exists because the US government decided to stop allowing the American-built Atlas V rocket to use Russian-supplied RD-180 engines. Atlas V has had an excellent reliability and safety record, one of the best in spaceflight history. But jingoism has put an end to that.

• The SLS rocket (prime contractor is Boeing) that launched the Artemis II flight recently does indeed work, but it costs literally billions per launch and has such a slow construction rate that they can launch roughly once every two years average. It's basically a disposable rocket built out of old space shuttle parts, because of the usual cozy arrangements between the defence contractors who made the space shuttle and the US senators who control NASA's budget. New R&D would be expensive and cut into profit margins. SLS is quite possibly the most expensive way to launch anything into space on a per-kilogram basis than any other rocket in history.

• Boeing's Starliner crew spacecraft (basically a taxi for space stations) has had three attempts at test flights, and all three were failures. The third had two astronauts aboard. There were so many problems with its thrusters that after finally safely docking to the ISS after a nerve-wracking docking approach with failing thrusters, NASA decided that for the safety of the two astronauts they would stay aboard the ISS and hitch a ride back home on a Crew Dragon instead. Their planned eight day stay on the ISS turned into a nine month stay and the Starliner was sent back down uncrewed for their safety.

• The ISS is aging fast, equipment failures are building up and maintenance is taking up more and more valuable astronaut time which would better be spent on science. There is no NASA space station replacement planned due to lack of funding by the US senate, and the plans for NASA to use commercial space stations on a contract basis is a shitshow because those commercial stations are delayed with no realistic ETAs.

• NASA is having problems getting plutonium-238 for nuclear power sources for deep space probes. No RTGs means no exploration beyond Jupiter's orbit because solar power isn't practical the farther out you get. They have enough for missions already funded and under construction but nothing beyond that.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, I could write a whole lot more. I didn't include Starship R&D problems because - same caveat of hating the owners but respecting the actual workers there - it's the most ambitious rocket R&D program ever. They're trying to build a type of rocket that has literally never been attempted before, a fully-reusable super-heavy-lift system with autonomous vertical landings of both stages. I think it would be unfair to criticize the pace of Starship R&D without having some baseline of a similar program to compare it to, and no such baseline exists. But I do blame their senior management and ownership for offering timeframes to NASA that can't be guaranteed.

In comparison to all that, China is doing great. They have a large space station on orbit. They successfully operate upgraded Soyuz-derived crew spacecraft, the Shenzhou. They have a new larger crew vehicle Mengzhou in final testing. Many models of new rockets are under successful development, including the very advanced and so-far-successful Long March 10 series. Their moon landing R&D program is on schedule. Their uncrewed science programs are all successes. The short version is that China isn't currently doing anything that hasn't been done before, but they're doing it all very successfully and with highly advanced domestically-developed technologies.