Footage on Chinese television showed the booster dropping on a single engine, smoke streaming from its top, before a net strung across a ship’s gantry took its weight. It was Friday, July 10, 2026, and China had just recovered an orbital rocket booster for the first time.
The Long March 10B had lifted off from Hainan island at 12:15 pm Beijing time on its maiden flight. Its upper stage carried a satellite, which state media said reached its “predetermined orbit”. The mission would have counted as a success without the landing. The landing is what people will remember.
A catch, not a touchdown
About six minutes after the stages separated, the first stage came back under power, righted itself and settled into the tensioned net on a recovery ship in the South China Sea. The ship, Linghang Zhe, or “Navigator”, carries a tall open steel gantry with cables strung across it above the deck.
SpaceX sets its Falcon 9 boosters down on four fold-out legs. The 10B has none. It carries landing hooks near the top of the stage and lowers itself into the net until they catch. China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) called it “the world’s first network-based recovery of a launch vehicle”.
The reasoning is weight. Every kilogram of landing leg is a kilogram of payload left on the ground, so moving the catching gear onto the ship gives a lighter rocket that can lift more. SpaceX made a similar trade with its far larger Starship booster, which is caught by the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower.
CASC described the result as “a historic breakthrough in the field of reusable rocket technology” and confirmed that both launch and recovery were complete successes.
The rocket and the record
The 10B stands about 63 metres tall, a little taller than a Falcon 9. Kerosene and liquid oxygen feed the first stage; methane and liquid oxygen feed the second. In reusable configuration it can carry about 16 tonnes to low Earth orbit, roughly the Falcon 9 class with a recoverable booster.
China is only the second country to recover an orbital-class booster, after the United States, and the first to do it on a rocket’s very first flight. Blue Origin lost its first New Glenn booster on the way down. SpaceX crashed boosters into the ocean for years before its first landing in 2015.
The scale gap is large. SpaceX has landed orbital boosters more than 600 times, and last week flew one Falcon 9 booster for a record 36th time. Blue Origin joined the club in November 2025 and reflew a New Glenn booster in April. China has landed one.
Other Chinese reusable designs are coming. CASC’s Long March 12A and Landspace’s Zhuque-3 both reached orbit last December but failed their landings.
Moon plans and a second flight
The 10B is the single-core sibling of the Long March 10, the three-core rocket China is building to put astronauts on the Moon by 2030. The crewed Mengzhou capsule and the Lanyue lander are to launch separately and meet in lunar orbit. A clean first outing for the shared hardware helps Beijing’s timeline.
CASC says the recovered first stage will fly again before the end of 2026. If it does, China will have gone from no landings to a reflown booster in under six months. SpaceX took about fifteen months to do that, and Blue Origin about five.
