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LandSpace's recovered Zhuque-3 booster puts China one reflight away from rocket reuse
LandSpace has brought a Zhuque-3 booster back to Earth, a first for China, but no Chinese booster has flown twice, and SpaceX has done it hundreds of times. Launch savings come from reflying hardware, and China's 2030 'space power' plan depends on exactly that.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- LandSpace launched a Zhuque-3 rocket last month and landed its booster stage safely back on Earth, a first for China.
- Zhuque-3 is LandSpace's latest design and made its first flight only last year.
- No Chinese booster has yet flown a second time, while SpaceX has routinely reflown boosters hundreds of times.
- China's 15th Five-Year Plan aims to make the country a 'space power' by 2030 and includes developing reusable rockets for its lunar and satellite-network goals.
- Galactic Energy's Pallas-1 made its first flight this month without any attempt to recover its booster.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost Recovery lowers launch cost only if a landed Zhuque-3 stage flies again for less than a new stage costs. Until one does, LandSpace's launch economics stay unproven.
- constraint The plan ties Chinese astronauts on the moon and a Starlink alternative to reusable rockets. A slow path from one landing to routine reflight would hold back both goals.
- contradiction Ellis puts China ten years behind on today's technology, yet Deep Blue Aerospace's founder says China can catch up by 2030. The plan's deadline rests on the more optimistic of the two estimates.
- exposure Leoni argues a nation without its own cheap, quick route to orbit risks being shut out by others. For Beijing, that makes reflight about access to space as well as launch prices.
Kevin Sagis at the University of Texas at Austin says the benefit of reusable rockets is simple: they are cheap [5]. He compared the SLS with the Saturn V, which he said cost about a billion dollars and was thrown away after every Apollo launch [6]. "The SLS is about $5 billion. It's just not sustainable," he said [7].
The saving he describes comes from flying the same stage again. LandSpace has shown it can land a Zhuque-3 booster [1]. It has not yet flown one a second time. The report does not include a launch price or any refurbishment figure for the rocket. For size, New Scientist compares Zhuque-3 with SpaceX's Falcon 9. Zhuque-3 stands 66 metres, four metres shorter than Falcon 9's 70 [8][9].
Chris Ellis at the University of Nottingham qualifies his own estimate of the gap. The contest, he says, is a cluster of hundreds of small challenges, and China may already lead in some of them [12]. Reflight is one of those challenges, and I think it is the one the cost comparison turns on. Ellis's example of a Chinese lead lies elsewhere. In 2023 China's Zhuque-2 became the first methane-fuelled rocket to reach orbit, and SpaceX has yet to match that [13].
Sagis sees China holding advantages the Soviet Union had in the cold war [16]. He listed a one-party government that can marshal huge resources without regard to election cycles, a strong motivation to succeed and loose regulation. He adds a tolerance for risk. In his view an expensive failure is less likely to end a programme in China, where politicians worry less about public perception [17]. "Space isn't risk-free, right? If you wanna do something audacious, you have to accept some risk," he said [18]. I'd expect that tolerance to count most at the reflight stage. The only way to learn what a used booster can take is to fly one and accept that some will be lost.
Zeno Leoni at King's College London sees the stakes as political. He said previous speeches from Chinese President Xi Jinping carry the idea that the leading technological power is also the leading geopolitical superpower [19]. China wants to master AI, quantum, fusion and space by the 2049 centenary of its founding. Leoni expects it to overtake the US in some of these but not in all of them [20].
What to watch
- A second flight of a recovered Zhuque-3 booster, and how long LandSpace takes between landing it and flying it again.
- Any published Zhuque-3 launch price or refurbishment cost, which would let the cost gap with Falcon 9 be measured.
- Whether Galactic Energy attempts to recover a Pallas-1 booster on a later flight.