The Landing

Everything cheap about modern spaceflight flows from one trick: landing the rocket and flying it again. SpaceX proved it in 2015 and has since landed boosters more than 600 times. China’s commercial firms have spent years trying to copy it, and the attempts have been a public, bruising education.

The breakthrough came in stages. LandSpace flew its stainless-steel, nine-engine Zhuque-3, a rocket openly modelled on Falcon 9, about 66 metres tall and rated to 18 tonnes to low orbit, for the first time in December 2025; the upper stage reached orbit, but the reusable booster lost an engine on its landing burn and exploded in a fireball.^[1] On its second flight, in August 2026, the booster came back and settled on its legs, China’s first recovery of an orbital-class booster on land, though some observers reported it toppled after touchdown.^[2]

A bruising apprenticeship

Others have paid tuition too. In June 2024 Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3 broke free of its test stand during a static fire near Gongyi, flew unplanned for roughly fifty seconds, and crashed into evacuated hills, an accidental launch, with no casualties.^[3] Deep Blue Aerospace’s Nebula-1 completed ten of eleven objectives on a 2024 hop test before an engine-shutdown fault brought it down hard, a near-miss rather than a triumph.^[4] Even the state giant is in the race: a commercial Long March 10B recovered its first stage with a net capture on a ship off Hainan in July 2026, China’s first maritime rocket recovery.^[5]

Landing a booster is not the same as flying it again. On the metric that matters, reflight, China’s score is still zero.

Here is the caveat that keeps the milestone honest. Recovering a booster is a necessary step, not the finish line. The economic magic of Falcon 9 is reflight, landing the same stage and launching it again, many times, and as of mid-2026 no Chinese provider had demonstrated that even once. The firms are at the landing stage; SpaceX has been operating there for a decade.

Why this is on our list

The reusability race is the single best gauge of how far China’s launch ambitions have to travel. The progress is real and accelerating, and the direction is not in doubt; a Chinese Falcon-9-class rocket in routine reuse is a question of when, not whether. But the honest scoreboard reads recovery, not reuse, and a decade of SpaceX cadence sits between a first landing and a working business. We underwrite the firms demonstrating hardware over those selling roadmaps, treat the first successful reflight as the milestone that actually matters, and price the gap to SpaceX as large, closing, and not yet closed.