The company did better yesterday, when a Zhuque-3 sent a satellite into orbit and managed to land its first stage. You can see a video of the landing on the company\u2019s Weixin account<\/a>.<\/p>\n The company says<\/a> the rocket lifted off at 7:35 AM yesterday, split its first and second stages 137 seconds into the flight, and landed the first stage at 7:41 AM. The launchpad and landing site are about 250km apart.<\/p>\n \n LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 first stage lands in northern China<\/p>\n LandSpace says the rocket performed a high-altitude return attitude adjustment, reentry ignition powered deceleration, aerodynamic gliding control, landing ignition deceleration, and deployed its landing legs. \u201cThe mission systematically verified the entire process of the first stage returning to the land landing pad from high-speed flight,\u201d the company trumpeted.<\/p>\n Re-usable rockets reduce the cost of space flight by removing the need to build a vehicle for every launch. LandSpace has designed its engines and first stages to fly up to 20 times.<\/p>\n It hasn\u2019t proven it can re-use a rocket even once, yet, or how quickly it can get a used vehicle back on the launchpad. Just landing a first stage is, however, mightily impressive as only SpaceX and Blue Origin have previously achieved the feat.<\/p>\n China has big ambitions in space, including huge constellations of broadband satellites, extending its space station, and building a moon base. Beijing knows re-usable rockets will help \u2013 it recently tested catching them in a net mounted on a barge at sea. State media has hailed<\/a> LandSpace\u2019s feat as a \u201cmajor breakthrough\u201d and reported that China\u2019s National Space Agency is working on other re-usable tech to advance the nation\u2019s ability to launch more stuff, more often, at lower cost. \u00ae <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"offbeat Red alert for rivals as LandSpace nails it after December disaster Chinese space startup LandSpace has landed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-574776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/5290116.webp\")
<\/p>\n