This dissertation asks: why does China pursue expensive and attention-grabbing space capabilities with limited material payoffs? Like other spacefaring powers, Chinese leaders have long recognized the many commercial and security advantages to possessing advanced space capabilities. Yet China’s most expensive and technologically difficult capabilities, such as its human spaceflight and lunar exploration programs, have limited and questionable material payoffs. To explain these patterns in China’s pursuit of space capabilities, this dissertation argues that regimes adopt prestige narratives to legitimate their rule domestically. Prestige narratives appeal to collective self-esteem by promising to increase or ‘restore’ the nation’s prestige. Regimes are incentivized to adopt these policies because they can boost national-level identification and ameliorate citizens perceptions of domestic social problems. However, although these projects may have positive domestic benefits, they can also have steep costs and unintended consequences, such as exacerbating threat perceptions abroad. Nonetheless, when regimes adopt these prestige narratives, they can become socialized or entrapped by their discourse—leading them to invest in costly prestige projects that they may not have pursued otherwise. This dissertation draws upon data collected from fieldwork carried out in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. The data includes interviews with American and Chinese individuals focusing on space policy from government, think tanks, industry, journalism, and academia, as well as Chinese writings such as memoirs, collected writings, official histories, and white papers. This dissertation also tests whether these prestige strategies benefit regimes domestically by carrying out a survey experiment; and, in doing so, provides (to the author’s knowledge) the first study of Chinese public perceptions of space policy. This dissertation draws also upon data collected from participant observation in aerospace shows, museums, conferences, and the author’s participation in a series of Track II dialogues on U.S.-China cooperation in commercial space.