For nearly a decade, recovering an orbital rocket booster has been a capability associated with just one company. SpaceX made it routine. Blue Origin only recently joined the club. Now China has entered the conversation.
Last week, the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, or CASC, successfully recovered the first stage of its new reusable orbital launch vehicle after sending a satellite into orbit. The mission marked the debut flight of the rocket, which completed its primary objective before reigniting its engines and guiding itself back toward a recovery ship waiting at sea. With the flight, China became only the second nation to demonstrate the controlled recovery of an orbital class rocket booster.
The landing looked very different from anything SpaceX has done. Rather than extending landing legs and settling onto a floating droneship, the returning booster descended into a massive net suspended above a recovery vessel. The approach is unconventional, but the technical challenge remains essentially the same. Bringing a rocket back from the edge of space requires split second guidance, multiple engine restarts, highly sophisticated flight software, and a vehicle capable of surviving the extreme stresses of hypersonic reentry before slowing into a controlled vertical descent.
It is a significant milestone for China’s reusable launch ambitions. It is also a reminder of how dramatically the industry has changed. SpaceX first landed an orbital booster in 2015. Since then, Falcon 9 has been recovered and flown again more than 600 times, turning what once seemed impossible into standard operating procedure. CASC now plans to refly its recovered booster before the end of the year, an equally important step because recovering rockets is only half the equation. Flying them again is what changes the economics.
That shift has already transformed the launch industry. Over the past seventeen years, SpaceX has reduced the cost of reaching orbit by roughly 95%, driving launch prices from around $15’600/kg to well below $1’000/kg through the partial reusability of Falcon 9. Lower costs unlocked an entirely different business model. Starlink now serves more than twelve million active users around the world because SpaceX can launch satellites at a cadence and price point that no competitor has yet been able to match.
The next leap could be even more profound. If Starship (SpaceX’s next generation launch system) achieves full and rapid reusability, launch costs could eventually fall below $100/kg. At that point, entirely new industries begin to make economic sense, from manufacturing in orbit to space-based power generation and even data centers operating beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
China clearly understands the implications. A reusable launch fleet would slash domestic launch costs while supporting Beijing’s growing satellite networks and broader ambitions in space infrastructure. The global launch market remains divided by geopolitics and national security restrictions, but lower prices would allow China to offer compelling launch services to partner nations while expanding its technological influence across emerging markets.
The strategic implications extend far beyond commercial launches. Less expensive access to orbit would make it easier for China to deploy communications constellations capable of competing directly with Starlink across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It would also begin to erode one of the United States’ most important advantages in space, namely the unmatched launch capacity that SpaceX has built over the past decade. That advantage has taken on growing military significance as Starlink has become an increasingly important communications platform in conflicts such as Ukraine, prompting China and Russia to explore technologies designed to counter it.
Chinese launch companies such as LandSpace, Galactic Energy, Deep Blue Aerospace, and CAS Space are all racing to achieve routine booster recovery, suggesting that reusable launch vehicles could soon become the norm rather than the exception. This points to China’s space economy entering a phase of rapid acceleration, reminiscent of the transformation seen in the U.S. over the past decade.
As launch costs decline and launch cadence increases, a broad domestic supply chain—from satellite manufacturers such as China Spacesat to aerospace electronics providers like Aerospace Hi-Tech—is likely to benefit, supported by Beijing’s strategic objective of building a self-sufficient space ecosystem.
Western suppliers could also benefit from the emergence of China’s commercial space industry, but the opportunity is likely to remain limited. While exports of non-sensitive commercial technologies may still be possible, advanced space subsystems and other strategically important technologies are subject to increasingly stringent export controls across the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South Korea, restricting foreign participation in China’s most advanced/military space programs.
