BEIJING, July 10 — When a rocket stage falls back to Earth, it usually ends as wreckage in a remote ocean or a scrap of space junk. China just proved it does not have to be that way. The Long March 10B, a two-stage liquid-fueled rocket built by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), made its maiden flight on July 12, 2024, from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan island.
It lifted off at 9:00 a.m. Beijing time. But the real news came about ten minutes later.
Here is how it worked. The rocket’s first stage is powered by seven YF-100K engines, which burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. At liftoff, they produce a combined thrust of about 1,200 metric tons.
That is enough muscle to send up to 27 metric tons of payload into low Earth orbit. About two minutes and thirty seconds after launch, the first stage separated from the rest of the vehicle.
Then it did something unusual: instead of tumbling back to a watery grave, it began a controlled descent. Grid fins deployed. The engines restarted and throttled down to slow the fall.
Landing legs swung out. The booster touched down vertically on a platform in the South China Sea. This was China’s first successful recovery of a liquid-fueled rocket booster.
The test validated several key technologies. Engine restart in flight is notoriously difficult — the pumps, valves and combustion chamber must handle the shock of reignition after a high-speed freefall.
Precision guidance kept the stage on target through atmospheric buffeting. The landing legs, which are folded against the booster during ascent, deployed cleanly at the last moment. The second stage, meanwhile, continued on a suborbital trajectory before splashing down as planned.
The mission did not carry a payload; it was a pure flight test. The significance of a recoverable first stage is straightforward: reusing boosters cuts launch costs dramatically.
The engine hardware, the turbopumps, the thrust chamber, the avionics — all of it can fly again. CASC now has a path to routine reuse, though it has not yet announced when the Long March 10B will fly a second mission or carry its first satellite. What researchers found during the test will inform the design of future Chinese launchers.
The Long March 10 family is expected to form the backbone of China’s crewed lunar ambitions. A recoverable first stage on a heavy rocket changes the economics of those missions. Intriguingly, the flight also demonstrated controlled landing over water rather than on solid ground.
That is a deliberate choice: a barge platform can be positioned to avoid populated areas and does not require a dedicated landing pad at the launch site. The South China Sea platform is essentially a floating runway for rockets.
For now, CASC has one successful landing under its belt. The next question is whether it can do it again — and again. That is the hard part.
One landing is a demonstration. A string of them is a capability.
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