Technology can be caught up with, but accumulating engineering data and enabling different parts of the technical system to evolve together will take time.<\/p>\n
![\"Successful](\"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Successful-Rocket-Recovery-Is-Only-the-Beginning.-Three-Priorities-Come-Next.gif\")
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At 12:15 p.m. on July 10, 2026, the Long March 10B<\/strong> Y1 carrier rocket lifted off successfully from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site. After stage separation, the first stage descended vertically and was captured by a net system on an offshore recovery platform.<\/p>\n The mission marked China\u2019s first successful controlled recovery of a carrier rocket and the world\u2019s first rocket recovery using a net-based capture system. The Long March 10B consequently became China\u2019s first reusable carrier rocket to complete a successful recovery.<\/p>\n At 7:35 a.m. on August 19, 2026, the Zhuque-3<\/strong> Y2 carrier rocket lifted off successfully from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone. Following stage separation, its first stage completed a soft landing as planned at a landing pad in Minqin County, Gansu Province.<\/p>\n It was China\u2019s first land-based recovery of the first stage of an orbital-class carrier rocket. Zhuque-3 also became China\u2019s first reusable rocket developed by a private rocket company to achieve a successful recovery.<\/p>\n China has therefore recovered two rockets using two distinct approaches: one at sea and one on land, with one developed by a state-owned organization and the other by a private company. These achievements demonstrate that China now possesses the engineering capabilities required for rocket recovery and have strengthened confidence across the industry.<\/p>\n Successful recovery, however, is a beginning rather than an end. China still has a long way to go before reusable rockets can generate genuine commercial value. Technology can be caught up with, but accumulating engineering data and enabling different parts of the technical system to evolve together will take time.<\/strong><\/p>\n Falcon 9 made its first flight on June 4, 2010. On December 21, 2015, SpaceX completed the first vertical land recovery of a Falcon 9 Full Thrust first stage. Although the landing succeeded, the recovery profile imposed a substantial payload penalty.<\/p>\n Between January 2015 and March 2016, SpaceX attempted four offshore recoveries, all of which failed. The company did not achieve its first successful vertical landing at sea until April 8, 2016.<\/p>\n Yet recovery was only the first step. The real test was reuse.<\/p>\n On March 30, 2017, the B1021 first-stage booster\u2014the same booster recovered at sea on April 8, 2016\u2014launched another Falcon 9 mission and was recovered again. This marked the first time in history that a previously flown orbital-class rocket had successfully launched a satellite, transforming rocket reuse from a theoretical concept into an engineering reality.<\/p>\n SpaceX subsequently continued refining its recovery and refurbishment procedures around the Falcon 9 Full Thrust design. That work ultimately produced Block 5, a version specifically designed for frequent reuse.<\/p>\n Its key improvements included an upgraded thermal protection system, more durable Merlin 1D engines rated to fly 10 times without major refurbishment, and titanium grid fins capable of surviving the high temperatures of atmospheric reentry. The design could reportedly be prepared for another launch in as little as 24 hours, with certain components requiring refurbishment only after every 10 flights.<\/p>\n Falcon 9 Block 5 made its first flight on May 11, 2018. During 2019 and 2020, Falcon 9 conducted 36 missions, achieved 33 successful recoveries and flew previously used boosters on 28 missions. The average interval between flights was approximately four months.<\/p>\n Falcon 9\u2019s reuse cadence then increased sharply, finally turning rocket recovery and reuse into a commercially meaningful capability.<\/p>\n From its first successful land recovery in 2015 to making reuse a reliable and economical routine by 2019, SpaceX completed more than 50 flights while adjusting its flight profiles, trajectories and attitude-control strategies and optimizing the overall system.<\/p>\n By 2019, a reused Falcon 9 retained around 70% of the payload capacity available in an expendable mission. This established the foundation for a commercially sustainable operating model.<\/p>\n By comparison, China still has some distance to cover before matching Falcon 9\u2019s recovery capabilities.<\/p>\n Take the Long March 10B as an example.<\/strong> Publicly available footage of its recovery appears to show the rocket descending at a relatively constant speed, hovering at the end of its descent and then being lowered into the recovery system.<\/p>\n This suggests that the rocket reaches an equilibrium between the booster\u2019s weight and the engines\u2019 minimum thrust during recovery. The vehicle\u2019s weight must be greater than that minimum thrust, indicating that the Long March 10B first stage may have weighed more than 100 tonnes during recovery.<\/p>\n Falcon 9, by contrast, descends at high speed before conducting a continuous final landing burn timed to place it directly on the recovery platform. Its engine thrust exceeds the booster\u2019s weight during this maneuver. Falcon 9\u2019s first stage is comparatively light, weighing around 24 tonnes without propellant.<\/p>\n Reducing a booster\u2019s empty weight to this level lowers the amount of propellant required for recovery and is essential to achieving commercially viable reuse.<\/p>\n Zhuque-3 offers another example.<\/strong> According to publicly available information, the rocket\u2019s full configuration has a potential downrange recovery distance of 550 to 600 kilometers. Zhuque-3 Y2, however, landed at a site in Minqin, Gansu, approximately 390 kilometers from the launch site.<\/p>\n This suggests that the stages did not separate at the optimal point for maximizing payload performance, which affected Zhuque-3\u2019s carrying capacity to some extent.<\/p>\n This does not mean that China\u2019s technology is insufficiently advanced, nor does it diminish the significance of the two recoveries. Engineering development is inevitably incremental.<\/p>\n SpaceX also turned \u201crecoverable\u201d into \u201cprofitable\u201d one step at a time through engineering innovations in propulsion, structures, thermal protection, landing and navigation. China has now completed the first step. The next task is to accelerate the pace of iteration.<\/p>\n The first priority is to return recovered rockets to the launch pad as quickly as possible, demonstrate reflights and, through continuous iteration, finalize a first-stage version specifically designed for high-frequency reuse.<\/strong><\/p>\n It took SpaceX hundreds of flights to gradually refine the engineering details of rocket recovery. Every recovery functioned as a destructive stress test.<\/p>\n The company had to examine combustion stability when engines throttled deeply, hinge vibrations affecting grid fins during transonic flight, and plasma erosion in gaps between thermal-protection tiles during reentry.<\/p>\n Such details cannot be fully learned from textbooks or wind-tunnel testing. Only repeated flights and repeated adjustments can reveal the hidden limits that bring a vehicle close to failure.<\/p>\n Through hundreds of flights, SpaceX acquired more than individual technologies. It developed an entire set of engineering practices and boundary parameters. China can neither eliminate nor bypass this process.<\/p>\n Reflight must come quickly, iteration must be aggressive, and the final design must be stable. Only by executing all three steps effectively can China\u2019s rockets become reusable vehicles with real commercial value.<\/p>\n The second priority is to continuously improve the rocket\u2019s payload fraction.<\/strong><\/p>\n A rocket must first achieve extremely high efficiency in expendable operations before recovering it can make commercial sense.<\/p>\n Falcon 9, for example, has achieved a payload fraction of around 4%. In reusable mode, it retains roughly 70% of its expendable payload capacity. In other words, a rocket capable of carrying 22.8 tonnes on an expendable mission can still deliver about 15.6 tonnes when its first stage is recovered.<\/p>\n Because the rocket itself is relatively light, less propellant is required for recovery.<\/p>\n Neither China\u2019s state-owned developers nor its private companies have yet reached this level. If a rocket has a payload fraction of only 2%, recovery may leave it with just 30% of its expendable payload capacity.<\/p>\n At that point, the economics become difficult to justify. The cost per kilogram of a reusable mission may differ little from that of an expendable launch.<\/p>\n If the payload fraction is only 1%, the vehicle would effectively be recovered for recovery\u2019s sake, with almost no useful payload capacity remaining in reusable mode.<\/p>\n Maximizing rocket efficiency is therefore a critical prerequisite for commercially viable recovery.<\/p>\n The final priority is to gradually establish a new operating and institutional system designed for high-frequency rocket reuse.<\/strong><\/p>\n SpaceX independently controls the entire chain, including rocket propulsion and vehicle design, manufacturing, testing, launch and recovery. It has built an integrated system covering launch sites, recovery zones, maintenance facilities, assembly plants and even payload operations.<\/p>\n This full-chain coordination is an important prerequisite for frequent reuse. Until China establishes a comparable system, it will be difficult to match Falcon 9\u2019s annual launch capacity.<\/p>\n Companies cannot build such a system alone. Every part of the industrial chain must undergo internal reform, with breakthroughs required in policy, regulatory approvals, financing and supply-chain coordination.<\/p>\n Ultimately, high-frequency reuse is not the responsibility of a single company or factory. It requires an upgrade of the entire space industry ecosystem.<\/p>\n Only through coordinated reforms can China turn rocket reuse into a standardized production line extending from design and recovery to refurbishment and reflight\u2014instead of treating every landing as another nerve-racking final examination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China has successfully recovered two orbital-class rocket boosters\u2014one at sea and one on land\u2014but recovery itself is only the starting point. Turning reusable rockets into a commercially viable capability will depend on three priorities: Rapidly returning recovered boosters to flight and developing a first stage optimized for frequent reuse; Continuously increasing the payload fraction to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[135,291,479,237,8791,238,8805,7259,316,7297],"class_list":["post-88521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-china","tag-commercial-space","tag-falcon-9","tag-landspace","tag-long-march-10b","tag-reusable-rockets","tag-rocket-recovery","tag-space-launches","tag-spacex","tag-zhuque-3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88521"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88528,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88521\/revisions\/88528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Return Recovered Boosters to Flight as Quickly as Possible<\/h2>\n
Keep Increasing the Payload Fraction<\/h2>\n
Build a New System for High-Frequency Rocket Reuse<\/h2>\n