BEIJING, July 10 — The story of China’s push to the moon is, at its heart, a story of hardware that refuses to die. On a recent test flight, the first stage of the Long March 10B rocket was successfully recovered, and now the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) has announced plans to fly that very same stage again within six months.
It is a gamble on reuse that, for those involved, carries enormous stakes. The Long March 10 family is not a single rocket but a paired system: the Long March 10, designed to carry a crew, and the Long March 10B, an uncrewed cargo variant that just proved it can come home. The crewed version is built to haul up to 27,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, a payload capacity that China intends to aim straight at the lunar surface.
What unfolded from CASC’s announcement is a clear timeline. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has already settled on a two-launch architecture for its planned crewed lunar landing, targeted for 2030. One Long March 10 will loft a lunar landing module; a second, identical rocket will launch a crewed spacecraft. The two vehicles will rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit before the crew descends to the surface. For those watching from the West, the plan mirrors the Apollo-era approach, but with a distinctly modern twist: every piece of this architecture is being designed with reusability in mind.
The reusable technology validated by the Long March 10B test is expected to lower launch costs for these critical missions. CASC has not released specific cost figures, but the logic is straightforward — if you can catch and refly a first stage, you stop throwing away the most expensive part of the rocket on every mission. The same principle that transformed SpaceX’s economics is now being applied, step by step, to China’s lunar program.
A Rocket That Refuses to Be a One-Off
The next test flight of the Long March 10B is scheduled for late 2024, with the explicit goal of recovering and reusing the first stage once again. For those inside CASC, the pressure is immense: a failure on the reflight would set back not just the test schedule but the entire lunar timeline. Success, however, would validate a path toward the kind of rapid reuse that has become the holy grail of modern rocketry.
CASC has also laid out a longer-term ambition: a fully reusable two-stage-to-orbit rocket by 2035. That target, still more than a decade away, suggests that the Long March 10B tests are as much about learning how to build a reusable fleet as they are about reaching the moon. The technology developed for the 10B’s first stage recovery — the guidance systems, the landing legs, the throttling engines — will feed directly into that future vehicle.
Beyond the Moon: The Tiangong Connection
China’s space station, Tiangong, was completed in 2022 and is now a permanent outpost in low Earth orbit. For those aboard, the arrival of cheaper, reusable cargo launches could transform resupply logistics. The Long March 10B, as an uncrewed cargo vehicle, is a natural fit for hauling supplies, experiments, and replacement parts to the station. If CASC can drive down launch costs through reuse, the frequency of resupply missions could increase, and the station’s operational budget could stretch further.
The narrative here is one of cascading benefits. A test flight that began as a demonstration of recovery technology is now the foundation for a lunar landing, a reusable rocket fleet, and cheaper access to China’s own space station. For those involved in the program, the next six months will determine whether that foundation holds.
Sources
- China's Moon Landing: The 2030 Crewed Plan Explained | OrbitalIntel
- China showcases new Moon ship and reusable rocket… – Ars Technica
