It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China’s growing launch capability.
It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. SpaceX has since added a second reusable rocket to its fleet with Starship and its Super Heavy booster. Perhaps a third American company will join SpaceX and Blue Origin’s club in 2027. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Relativity Space, and Firefly Aerospace—working in partnership with Northrop Grumman—are working on reusable rockets that could make their first flights in the next couple of years.
A similar number of launch companies are working on reusable rockets in China. Some of them operate under the auspices of the sprawling state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). Others are more commercial in nature, driven by capital investment from private industry.
After years of development, these Chinese launch companies made their first attempts to land their new rocket boosters last December. A company named LandSpace was first when it launched the first test flight of its new Zhuque-3 rocket. The rocket successfully reached orbit but missed its landing. Later that month, CASC’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology launched a new rocket named the Long March 12A with similar results.
Then, a third rocket, the Long March 10B from another CASC division, became the first to achieve a successful booster recovery July 10. The Long March 10B’s first stage was caught by a net recovery mechanism on an offshore platform in the South China Sea. Now, 40 days later, LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 has flown again, this time on a flight punctuated by a picture-perfect landing of its first-stage booster in northwestern China.