China successfully recovered a rocket booster at sea on Friday, marking the country’s first controlled landing of an orbital-class first stage and making China only the second nation, after the United States, to achieve the feat.
The Long March 10B rocket lifted off from the Hainan commercial space launch site in southern China, and roughly six minutes after its first and second stages separated, the booster descended vertically and was recovered on an offshore platform.
Unlike SpaceX, which lands boosters directly on a barge or launch pad using propulsive thrust and landing legs, China’s system used a first-of-its-kind method: a recovery vessel named Linghangzhe (“Navigator”) equipped with a dozen tensioned steel cables mounted on rail-guided dollies that automatically reposition themselves to help catch hooks on the descending booster.
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Reuters described the mechanism simply as a “net” system. The 70-meter-tall, 5-meter-wide two-stage rocket lifted off at 12:15 p.m. local time and is powered by seven YF-100K engines burning kerosene and liquid oxygen. State media said the successful recovery validated the rocket’s design for first-stage reuse and is expected to help lower launch costs going forward.
Friday’s flight was the debut launch of the Long March 10B, specifically, a cargo variant built for orbital missions, and follows months of incremental testing. In February, an earlier Long March 10 prototype completed a low-altitude abort test alongside China’s new Mengzhou crew capsule, in which the booster’s first stage and the capsule both splashed down under control in designated sea zones, without attempting a platform recovery.
China has also made two earlier attempts at booster recovery this cycle through separate programs. The first was Landspace’s Zhuque-3, whose maiden flight in December reached orbit but suffered an engine anomaly during descent, and CASC’s Long March 12A, though neither succeeded before Friday’s Long March 10B flight.
The rocket series is designed to eventually launch both the Mengzhou capsule and the Lanyue lunar lander on separate missions, with China targeting a crewed moon landing before 2030. China has set an aggressive launch pace to match those goals, having conducted a record 92 orbital launch attempts in 2025 and projecting more than 100, potentially as many as 140, for 2026.
