A Chinese aerospace company landed the bottom part of a rocket that went to space for the first time, state media reported on Wednesday, marking an advance for the country in its ability to partly reuse rockets for future missions.
The success follows the recovery of a different rocket’s booster stage, or first stage, which returned upright to a platform at sea last month. That vehicle was operated by a state-owned corporation, while Tuesday’s breakthrough was achieved by a private start-up, LandSpace.
Reusing rocket boosters would allow Chinese satellite makers to reduce the cost of getting to orbit, and better compete in the global space market.
“China is already prepped and primed to scale different space capabilities, like satellite communications, but they just needed reusable launch to really unlock the economics of that,” Kathleen Curlee, a senior research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said in an interview on Wednesday.
“Now that they’ve had multiple instances with two separate entities landing reusable rockets,” she said, “it just gives them even more power and capability to scale these companies that will be competitors for American companies.”
China still lags far behind its American competitors, she said, especially SpaceX, the private space juggernaut founded by Elon Musk. It first achieved a booster landing with its Falcon 9 vehicle in 2015. The Falcon 9 now launches and lands reused boosters on an almost daily basis. A second company, Blue Origin, started by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, landed the booster of its New Glenn rocket for the first time last year.
It is part of China’s core state strategy to pursue dominance in space, Ms. Curlee said, and Wednesday’s launch and booster landing was another step toward that goal.
In the morning, approximately 2 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff, the first and second stages of the reusable rocket, Zhuque-3, separated, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.
The first stage of the rocket touched down “smoothly,” Xinhua said, at the designated recovery site in Gansu Province in northwest China.
The second stage continued to fly and deployed a satellite into orbit.
LandSpace is one of several Chinese launch companies, Ms. Curlee said.
The company is trying to achieve profitability, “so they’re on a very aggressive path toward commercializing reusable launch,” she said.
Chinese companies have been launching satellites with single-use rockets, letting their parts fall back to Earth or into the ocean. In July, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a government entity, recovered the first stage of its Long March 10B rocket using nets on a boat in the South China Sea.
China is aiming to match the United States as a space power, with an ambitious program to put astronauts on the moon. It is also building a pair of satellite constellations that it hopes will rival SpaceX’s Starlink satellites in orbit.
The more than 10,000 Starlink vehicles account for about two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit, many of which provide high-speed broadband to remote and underserved areas globally. So far, the two Chinese constellations have only 400 satellites between them.
The partly reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, whose first stage returns to the launchpad upright, has revolutionized the space industry. It allows the company to send satellites into orbit in rapid succession.
China’s recent booster recovery breakthroughs are putting its space industry on a path to closing the gap.
“This matters because it makes China’s satellite communications industry much more competitive,” Ms. Curlee said, drawing a comparison to the rise of Huawei, the Chinese tech conglomerate that makes telecommunications equipment and smartphones.
“Huawei was able to scale and provide services all over the world, cheaply and in a robust way,” she said. “Countries and different users were willing to look over the security risks of using a Chinese system for communications,” she said, because it offered a quality, cheaper alternative.
Ms. Curlee said that once a Chinese company fields internet satellite constellations, other countries my think of it as an “alternative Starlink’.”
Still, one or two successful launches doesn’t spell success.
“There still is going to be some time where they have to continue to innovate, continue working on it, and prove that this is a repeatable instance and not just a fluke,” she said.
