On 19 August 2026, China’s LandSpace recovered the first-stage booster of its Zhuque-3 rocket on land, the country’s first orbital-class landing on legs and its first by a private firm. It echoes SpaceX’s 2015 Falcon 9 landing, but reusing the booster, not just recovering it, is the harder test ahead.

[For more news, click here] 

On 19th August, 2026, a privately funded Chinese company landed an orbital booster on its own legs, standing upright in the desert like something out of a SpeaceX reel. LandSpace, a Beijing startup, recovered the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket after sending a satellite to orbit, pulling off a feat that only a very small group of players on Earth can claim.

The rocket lifted off at 7:35 a.m. Beijing time from the Dongfeng launch zone in the Gobi Desert. About 137 seconds later, the first and second stages separated. The upper stage carried on to deliver the Honghu-3 satellite, while the booster turned around, fell back through the atmosphere, and settled onto its landing legs at a site roughly 390 kilometers downrange in Gansu province. LandSpace called it China’s first successful recovery of an orbital-class first stage using landing legs, and the country’s first booster recovery on land.

The comparison to SpaceX is unavoidable, and LandSpace does not shy away from it. To put it simply, this is the milestone that turned SpaceX from an ambitious upstart into the company that reshaped the launch industry. SpaceX first landed a Falcon 9 booster on 21 December 2015, on its third try, after two earlier attempts ended with boosters slamming into drone ships at sea.

“No one has ever brought an orbital class booster back intact,” Elon Musk said that night. Nearly eleven years later, LandSpace has joined that very short club.

What makes Zhuque-3 interesting is that it is not a straight copy. Falcon 9 is built from aluminium and burns kerosene. Zhuque-3 is built from stainless steel and burns methane, the same combination SpaceX chose for its far larger Starship. In other words, LandSpace borrowed Falcon 9’s recovery method, legs and a touchdown on solid ground, and paired it with the materials of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket. Even the recovery style differs from Starship’s own booster, which is caught in mid-air by the launch tower rather than landing on legs.

A Second Try, Not a First

This was also a comeback as Zhuque-3’s maiden flight on 3rd December 2025, reached orbit cleanly but ended with the booster exploding during its landing burn. That failure matters because it is a reminder that this kind of landing is genuinely hard, and that even capable companies tend to get there through wreckage. SpaceX failed more than once before December 2015. LandSpace needed one costly failure and one fix, by its own account, engineers reinforced the booster and changed the landing sequence from five engines down to three, then flew again.

LandSpace is not working in a vacuum either. Just weeks earlier, China’s state-backed Long March-10B recovered its first stage on a sea platform using a net, a different method to the same end. Between the state programme and a growing field of private firms, China now has a whole cohort of companies chasing reusability at once. The reason is straightforward. China is planning enormous satellite networks, Guowang and Thousand Sails, to rival Starlink, and you cannot fill the sky affordably if every rocket is thrown away after a single flight.

Recovery is Easy. Reuse is Not.

Landing a booster and reusing it are two very different things. SpaceX landed Falcon 9 in 2015 but did not fly the same booster a second time until more than a year later, and only after that did rapid, routine reuse slowly become normal. LandSpace now has to take a rocket that fell from the edge of space, inspect every part, repair what needs repairing, and fly it again for less than the cost of building a new one. The company says it hopes to reuse this very booster before the end of 2026. Until it does, and does it again and again, this is a landing, not yet a reusable rocket.

LandSpace was founded in 2015, the same year SpaceX first stuck a landing, and it reached the same milestone about eleven years later, a comparable run to SpaceX’s own climb from a standing start. In 2023, its Zhuque-2 became the world’s first methane-fuelled rocket to reach orbit, beating both SpaceX and Blue Origin to that particular line. The gap with SpaceX is still wide, measured in cadence, cost, and the hundreds of landings the American company has now logged. But on a desert pad in Gansu, that gap just narrowed by one very large step.

Related Articles

SpaceX’s Stock Volatility Has a Simple Explanation: Almost Nobody Can Sell It Yet

Unitree Robotics IPO Surges 629% in Shanghai, Valuing Company at Roughly $50 Billion

ICEYE Appoints UAE Chief Executive as Sovereign Space Intelligence Expands into the Gulf