China’s reusable rocket makes it to orbit, fails landing • The Register
There’s good news and bad news for the Chinese commercial launch industry. The good news is that LandSpace’s ZhuQue-3 launched successfully on its maiden flight. The bad news is that a hoped-for recovery of the first stage ended in a fireball.
The rocket launched on December 3, 2025, and successfully reached orbit. ZhuQue-3 is a two-stage rocket capable of lofting slightly more than 18 metric tons if the first stage is recovered (the figure is slightly higher if no recovery is attempted).
We’re sure that any similarities with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 are purely coincidental. Nine Tianque-12A engines power the ZhuQue-3 first stage, and the plan is for the booster to land vertically. Each booster should be good for at least 20 reuses, making it handy for building a satellite constellation (and the payload means plenty of satellites can be carried on a single launch).
There is also plenty of stainless steel used in the rocket’s construction. SpaceX’s Starship is famously made out of the stuff.
The mission itself went well. The first and second stages separated successfully, the fairing was discarded, and the second stage coasted in flight before restarting its Tianque-15A vacuum engine. The first stage should have returned to make a soft landing following stage separation, but things didn’t quite turn out that way.
During the landing phase, the first stage “experienced an anomaly after ignition.” The result was a fireball that showered debris on the edge of the recovery pad, showing how close the LandSpace team had come to nailing the landing after the first orbital launch.
Reusable rockets are all the rage following SpaceX’s demonstration that the technology could work and its rapid deployment of the Starlink constellation. The first stage of Blue Origin’s New Glenn landed successfully for the first time in November, and the first model of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) reusable rocket demonstrator, Themis, was erected on its Swedish launchpad in September.
The successful launch and almost-landing (well, it landed, just not the way the engineers hoped) of ZhuQue-3, as well as the activities of other rocket outfits, indicate that SpaceX could soon be facing competition on the reusability front both at home and abroad. ®
