The next flight of the Zhuque-3 rocket could take place later this month or in August, when LandSpace is expected to try to land the booster again. Other Chinese rockets that may soon be reusable include Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3, China Commercial Rocket Co.’s Long March 12B, CAS Space’s Kinetica-2, i-Space’s Hyperbola-3 and Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1. In the future, China aims to debut a huge new reusable rocket on the scale of Starship It was called Long March 9.
In the US, SpaceX has Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Rocket Lab plans to launch the first medium-lift Neutron rocket with a reusable booster by the end of the year. Relativity Space is developing a partially reusable heavy lifter called the Terran R, and Firefly Aerospace is partnering with Northrop Grumman on the Eclipse rocket, which officials say will eventually have a recoverable and reusable first stage. Stoke Space has an even bolder ambition of a fully reusable rocket called Nova.
Several European companies also plan to test reusable rocket technology, but their vehicles are not as mature as most US and Chinese rockets. Missile manufacturers in India, Japan, and Russia reuse their roadmaps with varying degrees of realism.
A proliferation of Chinese rocket companies, scattered across four land-based spaceports and multiple ocean launch platforms, must build for China to rapidly increase its launch rate.
“They probably won’t be able to get a higher release cadence, but not for a few years,” Galbreath said. “They currently have more launch sites than the United States, so if you combine their number of sites with reusables, they can surpass us in launch rate, which is something to be proud of in itself. But the resulting launch capacity can really have a significant impact on our competition, and if we do, it could be a conflict.
“There’s nothing wrong with competition as long as the conflict is peaceful,” Galbreath said. “It may spur innovation, but I worry that the historical pattern of Chinese behavior has not always been peaceful. So we have to look carefully at everything they do. On the one hand, they are competing with SpaceX, but we know that because of the way China organizes its military, its space capabilities and all its military control, their armed forces have a significant benefit from this competition.”
