China has now broken more ground in the area of space missions. In this week's mission, China launched the Long March-10B rocket from Hainan International Commercial Aerospace Launch Center in southern China.
The rocket not only successfully carried a satellite into orbit but also landed its booster on a net attached to a floating ship on the ocean surface. It is the first time such an operation has been executed in the entire world, and China becomes the second country in the world to have accomplished this feat after the USA.
Those familiar with the videos of Space X rockets landing on drone ships will understand what I am talking about. In such operations, a booster propels a rocket into orbit and comes back to Earth instead of landing in the ocean to get destroyed.
The uniqueness of the Long March mission lies in the manner in which it lands.
The Long March-10B launched roughly at 12:15 p.m. local time. After six minutes from the separation of the first stage booster of the rocket from the other parts of the rocket, the booster reoriented itself and fell back through the Earth's atmosphere vertically to an offshore recovery platform.
Unlike the SpaceX booster that lands via its legs, the Long March-10B booster landed using four "landing hooks" that attached themselves to a big net deployed on the platform. Using the net, the falling booster was stopped and recovered successfully.
It was a maiden voyage for the rocket, which means that it was a new rocket conducting its first-ever flight and recovery.
The method used by SpaceX, which is now well-known to most people, involves the use of landing legs that are already attached to the booster. The legs deploy shortly before landing and allow the booster to land on the platform either at the launch site or on the drone ship.
Chinese engineers took a completely different route. They did not attach any legs to the booster; instead, the "catcher" was built into the ground equipment, namely, into the net and the platform. As pointed out by Chen Muye, an expert from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the company responsible for developing the rocket, there are some clear practical benefits in this approach.
Not having any bulky landing legs makes the booster lighter and more straightforward in design, thus leaving more space for cargo.
There is an additional benefit that might prove to be even more significant from a practical point of view—forgiving errors. The fact is that it is not always possible for a rocket to land precisely at the target location.
Due to factors such as wind, navigation errors, and others, it may end up landing in a slightly different spot. As a result of the ability to stretch the net, it becomes possible to forgive minor deviations from a perfectly accurate landing.
A rigid-legged landing on a smaller platform would leave very little room for mistakes of this sort.
The Long March-10B has been developed by CALT (China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation), the primary rocket developer within the country. The rocket has been created for use in commercial launches and is capable of carrying a payload weighing at least 16 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
This makes it roughly comparable to SpaceX's Falcon 9, although there will be plenty of comparisons.
It wasn't the first time that China tried to recover a booster, but it was certainly the first time it worked. In the last year alone, there were two failed attempts at the exact same maneuver—once from a private Chinese company called LandSpace and once from a state-owned company.
That makes Friday’s feat all the more important, given that they managed to succeed where others had not.
The very essence of the story lies in reusability. With each launch, when the rocket booster ends up being disposed of, that’s a costly piece of equipment—typically the single most valuable part of the entire rocket—at the bottom of the sea. Without reusability, a launch company would simply not be able to launch frequently and economically.
This is exactly what SpaceX has accomplished. With the Falcon 9 capable of making 150 flights annually, meaning about three flights a week, where each flight takes place many times within the same year. A rate of flights like this had never been expected before ten years ago, but this has become the reason why SpaceX leads the way in the commercial space launch business.
For the past ten years, China has tried hard to accomplish the same feat, from hovering at low altitudes to today's success in making an orbital-class rocket retrieval.
The point of reusable rockets becoming a reality for China being associated with the economic policy cannot be overlooked. Lower launch costs mean that satellite constellations could be created easily by China since they need them so much due to their growth in the commercial space business.
The expectations are seen in how the market performed on Friday as shares of various companies in Chinese aerospace increased so much as to exceed the daily price limit, like the one of China Spacesat and China Satellite Communications.
These private rocket companies of China have been trying to do this, while the government has been facilitating them by easing the IPO regulations for the reusable rockets, providing them the money to continue their experimentations and improvements.
SpaceX has for decades been the only one to be able to return and use its rocket boosters, while only in November 2025 Blue Origin has achieved such a feat using its New Glenn. The recent successful flight of the Chinese Long March-10B proves, however, that this is no longer the case.
It does not mean, however, that China has caught up with SpaceX in terms of their cadence and reusability in any way, but it shows that the engineers from China have succeeded in solving the hardest part of the problem.
It remains to be seen whether the netting strategy proves to be equally reliable, or even more suited for some specific situations, compared to legged landings in the future as China makes more attempts at such retrievals in the coming months.
Nevertheless, in its current form, the accomplishment is all-encompassing: a unique landing method, a successfully completed maiden voyage, and an unmistakable indication that the global competition towards economical and reusable space travel now has multiple contenders.
