“Simple prestige is certainly a key driver in a lot of China’s space programs, in particular the manned space program,” said Mark Stokes, the executive director of the Project 2049 Institute, a research organization in Washington focused on security issues in Asia. “It’s also a way to mobilize resources and to concentrate resources in a way that could result in certain types of spinoff technologies.”

Above all, China has been learning how to orchestrate complicated engineering tasks and to surmount the poor bureaucratic coordination that has often frustrated such efforts, said Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who has studied China’s space programs.

“We in the U.S., in the West, tend to focus on the widget aspect of China’s space progress,” Mr. Cheng said. “But I would say that what we sometimes miss is how important these organizational changes are. All the Chinese space efforts are efforts at improving their systems engineering.”

China’s military drives the country’s space program, and that has caused wariness among Western governments. Suspicions have been magnified by allegations that China has stolen information for its space and missile programs. Congress passed a law in 2011 that bans the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from developing bilateral contacts with China, although multilateral contacts are not proscribed.

But China’s program has reached a point where deeper cooperation with the United States or Russia would make little difference, said Gregory Kulacki, China project manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He nonetheless supports closer contacts to foster cooperation and reduce mistrust. “They don’t really need to rely on any outside sources to continue to make the progress that they’re making,” Mr. Kulacki said.

China established a foothold in space in 1970, when a small, primitive satellite beamed back an ode to Mao Zedong, “The East is Red.” From the 1980s, the Communist Party leadership began to develop bigger plans, and in 2003, China sent its first astronaut into space. China has since carried out four more manned missions.

The Chang’e lunar exploration program, named after a moon goddess, began in 2007 with a craft that orbited the moon, and the Cheng’e-2 mission launched in 2010 sent back more detailed images of the moon, including of the area where Chang’e-3 will land. (The Chang’e-1 craft hurtled into the moon in a controlled, hard landing in 2009.)

For the Chang’e-3 mission, the rover — a solar-powered, six-wheeled vehicle similar to ones the United States has sent to Mars — will spend three months exploring and collecting data. A future mission that could take place in several years would be intended to bring back rocks and other samples from the moon. The Chinese government said in 2011 it was also studying sending an astronaut to the moon, but that remains a distant prospect.