China’s commercial space sector may be nearing a turning point. With the methane-fuelled Zhuque-3 (朱雀三号), the company LandSpace (蓝箭航天) wants to show that a recoverable first stage is possible outside the big state corporations too. The first flight on 3 December 2025 reached orbit according to the company; the attempt to recover the first stage failed, LandSpace says. According to the company, the next recovery attempt is planned for the second quarter of 2026, with a possible reflight of the booster floated for the fourth quarter of 2026 (as of: 29 Jun 2026).
Technically, LandSpace uses a stainless-steel airframe and nine Tianque-12A engines. Per company statements, the rocket is meant to be reusable at least twenty times, with a payload of roughly 21.3 tonnes to low Earth orbit. LandSpace names a cost target below 20,000 RMB per kilogram — for comparison, industry-wide averages among Chinese providers stood at around 75,000 RMB/kg in 2024 according to market observers, versus roughly 20,000 RMB/kg for SpaceX. That cost gap is the real driver behind the industry-wide reuse race.
What matters more than any single flight is the cadence that follows: only repeated, rapid reuse makes planned mega-constellations like Qianfan and the GW constellation economically viable. LandSpace has named this link explicitly as a strategic goal, and completed what it describes as the fastest IPO in the sector on Shanghai’s STAR Market (科创板) in December 2025.
A note on sourcing: the figures above come from company and state-media statements and should be read as such — attributed claims, not independently verified facts. The original sources are linked above for readers who want to check the numbers themselves.