LandSpace Zhuque-3 rocket achieves first land-based booster recovery
LandSpace recovered the first stage of its Zhuque-3 Y2 rocket on land for the first time on Wednesday, marking a milestone for China's commercial space program.
The rocket lifted off at 7:35 a.m. Beijing time from the Dongfeng commercial space innovation pilot zone in northwest China. Roughly 137 seconds after liftoff, the first and second stages separated. The first stage touched down at LandSpace's Landing Site No. 1 in Minqin County, Gansu province, at approximately 7:41 a.m., the company said. The second stage delivered the Honghu-03 satellite into its designated orbit.
Wednesday's recovery was China's first use of deployable landing legs to bring back a rocket stage on land, Xinhua said. During its descent, the first stage completed a series of maneuvers including attitude reorientation, a re-entry burn, aerodynamic gliding, a landing burn, and landing leg deployment, according to LandSpace.
The Zhuque-3 is a liquid oxygen-methane-powered rocket with an overall length of 66.1 meters. Its first stage is powered by nine TQ-12A engines, with thrust adjustable from 40 percent to 110 percent of rated power, Xinhua said. The rocket's body is made of stainless steel.
Wednesday's landing was China's second recovery of a rocket stage overall. On July 10, the first stage of a Long March-10B rocket was recovered on a sea platform using a net-capture system, according to NBC News .
According to Bloomberg , SpaceX has been reusing the first-stage boosters of its Falcon 9 rockets since 2017. That capability helped SpaceX establish dominance in commercial launches and support the expansion of its Starlink satellite network.
According to Bloomberg, LandSpace ranks among the most prominent commercial launch providers to have risen since Beijing began allowing private companies into the space sector about ten years ago. It made history in 2023 as the world's first company to send a methane-fueled rocket into orbit. The company applied last year to go public in Shanghai, according to Bloomberg.
Eric Zhu, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told Bloomberg that LandSpace "now faces the tougher engineering challenge of demonstrating it can rapidly and cost-effectively refurbish and refly that hardware — a process that took SpaceX several years to master."
