Watch China land a reusable rocket for the first time, a new challenge for Elon Musk’s SpaceX

SpaceX is flying high off the back of a record-breaking IPO, but China looks determined to bring Elon Musk back down to Earth.

China successfully landed the booster stage of its Long March-10B reusable rocket on Friday, the first time it has launched and partially returned a reusable orbital rocket safely to Earth.

It means that China’s Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, which built the rocket, joins Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin as the only organizations to have successfully landed a rocket booster.

Local media reported that the Long March rocket’s first stage touched down on a barge around six minutes after launch and was captured by a large net — reportedly the world’s first ever “net-based recovery” of a rocket.

Landing a first-stage booster, rather than letting it burn up on reentry, is a key milestone in building reusable rockets, which significantly lowers launch costs. SpaceX landed its first booster in 2015 and has since launched and successfully recovered its Falcon 9 rocket hundreds of times.

In 2024, SpaceX wowed the world by catching the nearly 400-foot-tall superheavy booster — which is used to propel its next-generation Starship rocket into orbit — with the chopstick-like arms of its “Mechazilla” launch tower.

Blue Origin scored its first booster landing last November, with the first stage of its towering New Glenn rocket successfully landing on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

Bezos’ rocket company has suffered setbacks since then, with New Glenn exploding on the launchpad in May.

Landing a booster is a significant step toward China’s ambition of catching up with SpaceX, which launches far more material into orbit than any other country or company.

The Asian superpower is also attempting to build a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, with state-backed company SpaceSail launching around 200 satellites into orbit since 2024.

That’s well behind Starlink, which has an estimated 10,000 satellites in low-earth orbit. China’s Long March rocket also lags behind SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with a max payload capacity of 16 tons compared to the Falcon’s 25 tons and Starship’s planned 100+ tons.

In a post on X in October, however, Musk said that China’s reusable rockets were catching up with SpaceX’s workhorse rocket — even if they were still some way behind the cutting edge.

“They have added aspects of Starship, such as use of stainless steel and methalox, to a Falcon 9 architecture, which would enable it to beat Falcon 9,” he wrote.

“But Starship [is] in another league,” Musk added.