The booster hung in mid-air, held by four small hooks on the cables of a ship. That was the end of the first flight of China’s Long March 10B on Friday, July 10th, and by the account of SpaceScout it made China only the second nation to propulsively land a reusable orbital rocket.
The rocket lifted off at 12:15 PM local time from Launch Complex 2 at the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site in Hainan. It flew through both stages and put the upper stage into a stable orbit around Earth. Whether it carried a working payload or a mass simulator was unclear at the time of reporting.
How the catch worked
After stage separation, the first stage steered back through the atmosphere on grid fins and headed for a soft landing in the South China Sea. It relit one of its seven YF-100K engines and descended into a large wire cradle on the recovery ship Linghanzhe. Then it deployed the hooks and caught the ship’s cables.
The Long March 10B has two stages. The reusable booster burns kerosene and oxygen, and the second stage burns methane and oxygen. Chinarocket Co. launched it. That firm is the commercial branch of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, which is affiliated with CASC, a prime contractor for China’s national space programs. Shortly after the launch, state media said Chinarocket plans to fly the recovered booster again by the end of the year.
A shared first stage
The 10B shares its first stage with the Long March 10A. In 2026, the 10A flew a shortened test article and splashed down in the ocean near the recovery ship. That mission also tested launch abort for the Mengzhou spacecraft, which is meant for lunar missions and will first reach orbit on a Long March 10A. Both designs descend from the much larger Long March 10, a triple-core rocket at the heart of China’s crewed lunar plans. Two Long March 10 launches, carrying Mengzhou and the Lanyue lander, are meant to support crewed landing attempts before the end of the decade.
Others who have done it
For nearly 10 years SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was the only booster to do this. Then SpaceX’s larger Super Heavy booster was caught by crane arms on its launch tower in 2024. Blue Origin’s New Glenn later made two safe landings, in 2025 and 2026. In December of 2025, LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 and the state-owned Long March 12 both attempted land-based recoveries. Neither worked.
The Moon race
US officials, including NASA leadership, have described the two countries as locked in a new Space Race, with Artemis aiming to land humans on the Moon on a similar timeline. NASA has twice flown Orion and SLS to the Moon, including the first humans to visit in more than 50 years. Its commercially procured landers have become a significant hurdle. The China Manned Space Agency has yet to match NASA’s lunar milestones, though SpaceScout says the 10B flight and the progress of Mengzhou point to steady advance.
