The record of Friday’s launch reads like a checklist: engines lit at 12:15 pm, stage separation about two and a half minutes later, booster caught in a net roughly six minutes after that. China’s Long March 10B flew for the first time, and its first stage did not fall into the sea. It was recovered intact.
China Daily called it the first time the country has recovered the main body of a carrier rocket. It was also, the paper said, the world’s first recovery of an orbital-class rocket with a wire arrestment system, a net of pretensioned cables. The Long March 10B is the nation’s first rocket, and the world’s third, to complete every key step of a full recovery profile: controlled return flight, vertical terminal descent and intact retrieval.
The flight, step by step
The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a Beijing-based subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, designed and built the rocket. Seven first-stage engines burning liquid oxygen and kerosene lifted the 63.6-meter-tall vehicle off a service tower at the Hainan International Commercial Aerospace Launch Center in Wenchang.
At separation, several kilometers above the Karman Line, the first-stage engines shut down. A single liquid oxygen-methane engine on the second stage took the payload toward orbit, and the upper stage later released a satellite into its preset orbit hundreds of kilometers above Earth.
The first stage coasted upward on inertia. Its grid fins unfolded, and the reaction control system adjusted attitude and trajectory before the descent began. Select engines then reignited twice, working with the fins and the control system to slow the fall. In between burns, the booster relied on a calculated falling position to shed speed against the air.
Catching it at sea
A recovery ship, the Linghangzhe, waited at a set site hundreds of kilometers southeast of Wenchang. Pretensioned cables sat on rail-mounted sliders that positioned themselves automatically to improve the odds of a catch. In the last seconds all first-stage engines cut off and metal hooks deployed to engage the cables. Auxiliary cables then reached out from around the booster to steady it, and a clamping platform slid beneath to lock and support it. The whole recovery, from stage separation, took about six minutes.
In the Wenchang control room, designers, engineers and ground controllers cheered when cameras on support vessels picked up the booster, and they “erupted into ecstasy” once the net held it, China Daily reported.
Numbers and next steps
Fully fueled, the rocket weighs about 760 metric tons, measures 5 meters across and produces a liftoff thrust of more than 890 tons. That makes it China’s second-most powerful launcher after the Long March 5, which weighs around 870 tons at liftoff with thrust of nearly 1,100 tons. It can carry 16 tons to a typical low-Earth orbit at an altitude of 200 kilometers, or 11 tons to a 50-degree inclined orbit at 900 km.
Others had tried and missed. LandSpace’s ZQ 3 and the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology’s Long March 12A both attempted the recovery and failed at the last moment. In February the Long March 10A flew its first mission, and its booster returned and made a controlled splashdown in the South China Sea as a planned trial.
Chen Muye, a structural designer of the Long March 10B, said the rocket was built in Tianjin and shipped to Wenchang in February. The net, he said, “removed the need for complex landing legs,” which cut structural weight and raised payload capacity and cost-effectiveness. He added that the method tolerates landing deviations because the cable-net system can widen the capture window.
Wang Wei, a project manager of the Long March 10 series, said the flight verified core technologies including methane self-pressurization. The rocket will mainly serve low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations, he said, and the recovered booster is expected to fly again before the end of this year.
