China’s state-owned space company successfully launched a Long March orbital rocket and landed the booster on a seagoing recovery vessel, making it the second country to achieve the feat.
The demonstration on Friday shows that China’s Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) is poised to match the advance that catapulted SpaceX to the top of the heap: reusing the same booster again and again to drive down the cost of launching spacecraft. CASC said it would attempt to reuse the booster, which can carry about as much payload as SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, by the end of the year.
Instead of unfolding landing legs to settle onto a floating platform, as the Falcon 9 does, China’s approach uses netting strung across a large frame onboard a recovery ship to capture the descending rocket. The ability to get the rocket back to the ship in a controlled flight, however, depends on sophisticated guidance software and sensors, along with engines that are reliable enough to restart and rugged enough to survive the descent back through the atmosphere.
SpaceX is currently breaking launch records on an annual basis with its fleet of reusable Falcon 9 rocket boosters. The vehicle underpins the company’s Starlink satellite network, which depends on cheap, regular space access, as well as its work for NASA and the U.S. Space Force.
China wouldn’t compete directly with Musk’s company for launch customers due to national security rules that effectively split the global market for rockets between the U.S. and Europe on one hand, and Russia and China on the other. However, a reusable rocket would enable China’s satellite communications networks and hypothetical orbital data centers to compete with SpaceX’s offerings.
That would mean more competition for Starlink in global mar …