Is China catching up to the US and SpaceX on reusable rockets?

Last month, LandSpace – China’s commercial SpaceX rival – launched a Zhuque-3 rocket and landed its booster stage safely back on Earth. The mission was a first for China, but the country has yet to actually use a booster more than once – something that SpaceX has routinely done hundreds of times. Can China catch up in the reusable rocket race?

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan sets out the country’s ambitions to become a “space power” by 2030, including developing reusable rockets that will be crucial to its goals to put Chinese astronauts on the moon and build a Starlink alternative.

Zeno Leoni at King’s College London says space is of growing importance for militaries and economies, and a stormy geopolitical climate means that nations need their own ability to cheaply and quickly put things into orbit or risk being shut out by others.

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“If you look at previous speeches from [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, there is the idea that if you are the leading technological power, then you also are the leading geopolitical superpower,” says Leoni. The country has an ambitious list of areas it wants to master by the centenary of its founding in 2049 including AI, quantum, fusion and space, and while Leoni says it will overtake the US in some of these, it can’t hope to master them all.

Kevin Sagis at the University of Texas at Austin says the benefits of reusable rockets are simple: they’re cheap. “The cost of the Saturn V rocket in the Apollo days – that we threw away after every launch – was about a billion dollars. The SLS is about $5 billion. It’s just not sustainable,” he says.

Sagis sees strong parallels between the unfolding reusable rocket space race, and the cold war space race between the Soviet Union and the US. China has many of the same advantages now that the Soviet Union had then: a one-party government that can coral huge resources and single-mindedly chase a target unswayed by election cycles and changing leaders, a strong motivation for success and loose regulation.

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SpaceX is often said to be taking a new, extremely capitalist approach – testing fast, failing often and rapidly reiterating – that’s more like Silicon Valley than traditional aerospace. But Sagis says that while this is an advantage, it’s also a return to the bold Apollo days at NASA. “It’s sort of come full circle,” he says. And he believes that it’s an approach that is paying off for SpaceX.

“What they’re aspiring to do is something audacious. Their talent and their expertise is exceptional. If you look at their track record, every mission is better than the previous one. I’d be shocked if we don’t look back at this and assess it as a success,” says Sagis.

But Sagis also sees risks in the US system. He warns that it will be important to learn from the cold war race and not lose interest or pull funding and scrap plans if the US lags behind at one point. Instead, the focus should be on the long-term benefits of advanced space travel. Russia put the first satellite into orbit, then the first animal, man and woman, says Sagis – but the US still put the first man on the moon.

“It’s the hare and the tortoise,” says Sagis.

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China also has an advantage shared by the Soviet Union in that it is more tolerant of risk. An expensive failure or the injury or death of an astronaut could put an end to space ambitions, but Sagis sees that as less likely to occur in China, where politicians are less concerned with public perception and winning elections. “Space isn’t risk-free, right? If you wanna do something audacious, you have to accept some risk,” says Sagis.

As far as today’s technology goes, China is 10 years behind, says Chris Ellis at the University of Nottingham in the UK. But he also points out that the race isn’t one linear problem solved from start to finish, but a cluster of hundreds of small challenges – and that China may be ahead in some. For instance, China’s Zhuque-2 became the first methane-fuelled rocket to reach orbit in 2023, a feat yet to be matched by SpaceX.

Both countries have other projects on the go; the US has Blue Origin and China has Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1, which flew for the first time this month – albeit with no attempt at recovery. The founder of Chinese space firm Deep Blue Aerospace has gone on record to say that China can catch up with SpaceX by 2030.

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The Zhuque-3 is LandSpace’s latest design, which first flew only last year. It’s just 66 metres tall, making it more like SpaceX’s 70-metre-tall Falcon-9. Landspace doesn’t yet have a rocket along the lines of SpaceX’s vast 124-metre Starship, so it still has plenty of catching up to do. But Zhuque-3 will allow the country to rapidly and cheaply launch satellites for a competing Starlink internet constellation.

China’s state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation also has the Long March 9 rocket still under development. It will feature a reusable first stage, and there are long-term plans to make the second stage reusable too. Some variants of another rocket under development, Long March 10, will also be partially reusable, and a test earlier this year recovered the first stage of a Long March 10 at sea.

Ellis says that China may not be as open about its progress as SpaceX is being, perhaps distorting public perception of its capabilities. Chinese companies and SpaceX will be scouring footage of each others’ launches for clues and information, he adds, and they may all choose to make deliberately vague disclosures.

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“They also don’t want to be sharing what they’ve lost. So I think China might have lost some more [rockets in testing] and they won’t publish it because that’s not what they want the world to see,” says Ellis.

Because of the direct applications to national security, space research is constrained by export controls and a certain amount of state secrecy. Ellis says that his own research is no different and that it has to pass both internal and government vetting before publication. He believes that, in a perfect world where countries could work together on designs, we’d likely already have bases on the moon.

“A lot of researchers working at universities are very keen to collaborate with other people, but when you’ve got big money and geopolitics involved, you don’t have that luxury,” he says.

Topics: China / Space exploration / SpaceX