By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, Dec 24 (Reuters) – Chinese rocket developer LandSpace plans to successfully recover a reusable booster in mid-2026, a company executive said in an interview, underscoring the Beijing-based firm’s ambition to become China’s answer to SpaceX.
The ability to return, recover, and reuse a rocket’s engine-packed first stage, or booster, after launch is crucial to reducing costs and making it easier for countries to send satellites into orbit, and to turn space exploration into a commercially viable business similar to civil aviation.
Earlier this month, privately-owned LandSpace became the first Chinese entity to conduct a full reusable rocket test, when Zhuque-3 blasted off from a remote area in northwest China for its maiden flight, drawing comparisons to U.S. aerospace giant SpaceX.
SECOND ATTEMPT PLANNED
While LandSpace failed to complete the crucial final step of landing and recovering the rocket’s engine-packed booster, it hopes to clear this challenge in mid-2026 with a second test flight, Zhuque-3 deputy chief designer Dong Kai told Chinese podcast Tech Early Know in an interview published on Tuesday.
“If the second flight’s recovery (stage) succeeds, we plan that on the fourth flight we will use a reused first stage to launch,” Dong said.
So far, the only company that has mastered reusable rocket technology is SpaceX, founded by the world’s richest person Elon Musk. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches around 150 times a year, or roughly three times per week, with its booster reused dozens of times if necessary.
Musk said in October that LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 design could allow it to beat the Falcon 9, but went on to state that the Chinese challenger’s launch cadence would take more than five years to reach that of SpaceX’s workhorse model, at which point the U.S. firm would have transitioned to its heavier, new-generation model Starship and “doing over 100 times the annual payload to orbit of Falcon”.
INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING
LandSpace’s Dong said that, while the company was already building an engine for a future Starship-like model, he was not optimistic that in five years Falcon 9’s work rate could be surpassed, noting that all rocket models in China combined this year totalled only around 100 launches.
“It’s very difficult for a single company to reach that kind of frequency. It requires the support of an entire ecosystem,” Dong said, adding that LandSpace had 10 launches planned next year for all its models.
Other executives have previously said that the financial cost of a high-frequency testing and launch regimen was crucial to SpaceX’s success, and that LandSpace’s only hope of amassing enough funds to sustain a similar programme would be by tapping China’s capital markets, pointing to plans for an initial public offering next year.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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