A Chinese company successfully made the first controlled landing of a rocket on land, about a month after the Asian country reached the first recovery on a sea platform.
© Getty Images
19/08/2026
by
Lusa
O rocket Zhuque-3 Y2 took off at 7:35 (00:35 in Lisbon), from the Innovation Zone and Dongfeng Commercial Aerospace Tests in the Gobi Desert (northwest), flying normally throughout the route and with the first section to land in a designated space within the recovery zone, state media reported.
However, the second section of the rocket managed to place the Honghu 03 satellite in its intended orbit, completing all mission objectives.
The Zhuque-3 Y2 was developed by LandSpace, a Beijing company and leader in China's commercial rocket industry, and became China's first commercial rocket to reach orbit and have the first phase recovered.
According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, this is a new step in Chinese plans to develop this technology, considered key to reducing costs, increasing the frequency of launches and sustaining future satellite constellations.
“ Under normal circumstances, the cost of liquid oxygen and methane fuel accounts for between 1% and 3% of the launch cost, and that of the first phase of the rocket, about 70% of the total. The more times the rocket can be reused, the lower the launch cost will be,” LandSpace said.
A first attempt to recover the Zhuque-3 Y2 in December failed, as the thruster exploded in a fireball over the landing site in the last seconds of the descent.
The company will now plan to accelerate the re-use of the ship’s body to advance towards a closed “launch-recovery-reuse” system that allows high-frequency and low-cost commercial operations.
Kang Guohua, senior member of the Chinese Astronautic Society and professor of aerospace engineering at Nanjing's University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told the state-owned Global Times that China became the second country after the United States to develop orbital class rocket recovery capabilities.
Currently, the US leads the development of reusable rockets, with SpaceX and Blue Origin advancing in different recovery technologies.
The Chinese aerospace sector, both state and commercial, has intensified the re-use tests of launchers in recent years, a process marked by several incomplete trials until, in July, China was able to recover the first phase of a Long March-10B rocket after a vertical return on a maritime platform.
The recoveries take place in full expansion of the space program of the Asian giant, with more launches, new types of rockets and greater competition between private companies and state programs, in parallel with projects such as the Tiangong space station, the Chang’e lunar program or preparations for a manned mission to the Moon before 2030.
Like Starlink, the American company SpaceX, Chinese projects such as Guowang and Qianfan predict to put more than 10,000 satellites in orbit in the future to provide global broadband coverage, creating both a global potential market and an infrastructure of military strategic importance.
To date, the Starlink network has already orbited more than 10,000 operating satellites, with over 12 million customers worldwide.
By comparison, the Guowang constellation of Beijing and the Qianfan network, supported by Shanghai, placed only about 200 satellites each in a limited expansion, partly due to the lack of a reusable work vehicle in China that is comparable to the reusable rocket Falcon 9, developed by SpaceX.