China's Long March-10B rocket recovery shakes up space race

China pulled off a feat only one other country had managed, recovering the first stage of an orbital-class rocket booster, and it did so without copying SpaceX's playbook.

The debut of the Long March-10B on Friday via a ship-based sea recovery net system as opposed to landing legs, which are employed by SpaceX, reignited the online discussion about who leads the reusable rocket race.

How China's net capture system works

As opposed to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn, which land on their legs, the Long March-10B was equipped with hooks to grab hold of taut cables attached to a floating retrieval vessel off Hainan.

Footage of the booster being hauled into the net around six minutes after the detachment of the stage has been released by the state media channel Xinhua. It is believed that such design reduces the structure’s mass and increases the allowable error in landing coordinates.

Space entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky said the US monopoly on affordable reusability was dead, noting the step would drive down costs while advancing plans for the deployment of satellites and lunar crew missions.

Meanwhile, analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera noted that one flight did not mean that SpaceX was dethroned but had undermined the belief that there is only one way back from space.

Some others, such as Pakistani columnist Javed Hassan, cited China’s history of rapidly scaling up complicated technology after developing prototypes.

This week, Goldman Sachs raised its projection of satellite launches in low-Earth orbit in 2031 to 305,000 satellites from an earlier estimate of 42,000 satellites, driven mainly by space-based data centres instead of satellite internet.