On Friday China made a giant leap in its ongoing effort to be a dominant player in 21st-century spaceflight by successfully launching and recovering the first stage of its Long March 10B orbital rocket on that vehicle’s maiden flight.
The feat places the nation in an elite club, bringing China alongside the U.S.-based aerospace firms SpaceX and Blue Origin as the only organizations on Earth to develop and operate such reusable rocketry. And in at least one respect, it shows how China can surpass its Western competitors: no one else has ever achieved such a flawless first-stage booster recovery on a vehicle’s inaugural launch.
Built by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, an affiliate of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the Long March 10B lifted off on July 10 at 12:15 A.M. EDT from the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site in the island province of Hainan. About 11 minutes postlaunch, after the spacecraft lofted an undisclosed satellite payload into orbit, the first stage returned to Earth, where it fired its engines to slow and control its descent into a novel net-based recovery system on an awaiting sea-based platform.
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“This mission marks our country’s first successful controlled recovery of a launch vehicle and the world’s first [net]-based recovery of a launch vehicle,” CASC announced in a subsequent social media post (as translated by Google). “It signifies a historic breakthrough for our country in the field of reusable rocket technology and will lay a solid foundation for accelerating the improvement of our country’s space access capabilities.”
The post also confirmed that China plans to reuse the maiden flight’s booster in another flight later this year.
Standing at 63 meters and featuring a five-meter-wide payload fairing, the rocket itself somewhat resembles SpaceX’s partially reusable workhorse Falcon 9, which is seven meters taller but has a similarly sized fairing. And unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, as well as Blue Origin’s partially reusable New Glenn vehicle, the Long March 10B lacks landing legs. Instead it relies on four comparatively lightweight “landing hooks” to snag onto its catching net.
The rocket, which is capable of hauling 16,000 kilograms into low-Earth orbit, is a commercial variant of the Long March 10A vehicle. That launcher was originally designed to transport crews and cargo to low-Earth orbit destinations such as China’s Tiangong space station. Both vehicles are offshoots from the nation’s Long March 10, a gargantuan rocket that is being developed to send Chinese astronauts to the moon. That’s a goal China has set for 2030, rivaling independent U.S. plans for a crewed lunar return by 2028 via NASA’s Artemis program. The Long March 10B, however, is seen as a crucial enabler for China’s burgeoning efforts to deploy vast satellite megaconstellations similar to SpaceX’s wildly successful Starlink system, which surpassed the milestone of having 10,000 active spacecraft in orbit earlier this year.
Even if today’s flight had hit snags, China still has other reusable rockets waiting in the wings. Two other vehicles—the state-developed Long March 12A and the commercial Zhuque-3 rocket from the state-sponsored company Landspace—have each completed test flights within the past year. Neither has yet successfully shown a first-stage booster recovery, however, and numerous other Chinese ventures are in earlier stages of developing reusable rocketry. Additional flights of the Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A are likely to come soon, although the scheduling is murky because of China’s tendency to stay tight-lipped about the specifics of its future plans.