Seven months after a fireball, China tried again to land an orbital rocket booster

A Chinese commercial rocket maker launched its second test of a reusable orbital booster overnight, attempting a precision landing after its first effort ended in a fireball seconds from the landing pad. LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 lifted off from Jiuquan Spaceport in northwest China carrying the same mission profile as its December 2025 predecessor, with one critical change: an updated engine ignition sequence designed to avoid the anomaly that destroyed the first booster.

The attempt is the latest milestone in China’s accelerating commercial space race. LandSpace is one of two private Chinese companies that have achieved orbital launches, and Zhuque-3 is its main bid to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 on cost. A reusable booster brings per-flight costs down by an order of magnitude — without one, Chinese commercial launch customers pay prices that cannot match SpaceX’s recovered-booster economics.

Zhuque-3 is a 66-meter methane-liquid oxygen rocket with performance in the same class as the Falcon 9. The December 2025 first flight reached orbit cleanly, with the payload successfully deployed. The booster made it back almost to the pad before an engine failed to ignite during the final landing burn, sending the vehicle into the ground meters from the center of the designated landing circle. LandSpace identified the ignition sequence as the specific point of failure and refined it for this second flight.

For LandSpace, a successful booster recovery would unlock government contracts and commercial funding at a scale that makes the company competitive internationally. China’s National Development and Reform Commission has designated reusable launch vehicles as a strategic national priority, and contracts flow toward companies demonstrating the capability. LandSpace has stated a target of reusing boosters by the end of 2026, leaving only months of margin.

No amount of engineering refinement eliminates the fundamental difficulty of landing an orbital-class booster — a problem SpaceX spent years and multiple failures solving before it became routine. The corrected ignition sequence addresses the specific failure mode identified in December, but reusable rocketry has a long list of failure modes that only emerge in flight. Engineering confidence and operational reliability are not the same thing.

Three prior Chinese attempts to recover orbital-class boosters — by LandSpace and state-linked programs — have ended in failure. The United States remains the only country with an operationally reusable orbital launch fleet. A successful Zhuque-3 recovery would mark the first orbital booster caught outside the United States anywhere in the world. The result of the overnight landing attempt was not yet officially confirmed by LandSpace as this article published.

LandSpace has not provided a timeline for a next attempt if this flight does not achieve a full recovery. The company’s end-of-2026 target for first booster reuse was set before the December 2025 setback, and how far that timeline has shifted depends on what last night’s data shows.

Tags: China, SpaceX, reusable rockets, commercial space, LandSpace, space tech