In a surprise launch, China debuts another big rocket designed for reusability - Ars Technica

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The race to field China’s first reusable launch vehicle is far less predictable than a similar competition that played out in the United States a decade ago.

There was never any real question of which company would develop and demonstrate the first reusable orbital-class rocket in the United States. SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for the first time in 2015, and a little more than a year later, it launched it back into space. It took nearly 10 years for anyone else to do the same. Blue Origin celebrated its first orbital-class booster landing last November with the successful recovery of one of its New Glenn boosters, followed by a relaunch of the same rocket in April.

In China, several companies and state-owned enterprises have a realistic shot at landing an orbital-class booster stage this year. For a time, it seemed like China’s new crop of privately funded launch companies might have the advantage in accomplishing the first landing of an orbital-class booster. But Monday’s launch of China’s Long March 12B rocket, backed by the nearly unrestricted resources of the country’s vast state-owned aerospace enterprise, suggests the industry’s legacy players may now have a leg up.

Secrecy reigns

China’s first two attempts to recover heavy boosters failed in December. First, a company named LandSpace, part of China’s recent wave of quasi-commercial launch providers, debuted its Zhuque 3 rocket on December 2. The launch was successful, but the booster crashed near its landing zone downrange from its launch site in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China. Less than three weeks later, a somewhat less powerful rocket named the Long March 12A had a similar result on its first test flight. The Long March 12A is a product of the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, part of China’s legacy government-owned space industry.

In early April, another relative newcomer to China’s launch sector launched its new medium-class Tianlong 3 rocket. The 7-year-old firm behind the Tianlong 3, named Space Pioneer, said the rocket failed to reach orbit, an outcome not uncommon for brand-new launch vehicles. Tianlong 3’s first stage booster is designed for recovery and reuse, but a landing attempt will have to wait until a future flight.

The Long March 12B, the largest and most powerful (potentially) reusable rocket China has launched to date, lifted off Monday from a remote launch pad in the Gobi Desert. The 236-foot-tall (72-meter) rocket took off at 4:40 pm Beijing time (08:40 UTC or 4:40 am EDT).

Unusually, Chinese officials appear not to have announced the launch in advance. The Chinese government did not issue any public notices for pilots to avoid the rocket’s flight path, as is customary for space launches around the world. It’s too soon to know if this was a one-off change or the start of a new policy for Chinese launches. Russia’s government, which has historically also released safety notices for its space launches, has begun issuing such warnings to cover extended periods over many days in a bid to conceal when a launch might actually occur.

The existence of the Long March 12B was not a secret. The rocket completed a test firing on its launch pad in China in January, and a launch was expected in the first half of this year. It was developed by China Commercial Rocket Co. Ltd., or CACL, an opaque business venture set up by China’s sprawling state-owned aerospace enterprise. According to Chinese state media reports, engineers designed and developed the Long March 12B in just 21 months. If the claim is true, it would be a remarkably fast timeline to progress from a clean sheet to an orbital flight.

Monday’s launch did not include any attempt to land the first stage booster, but the rocket carried grid fins and landing legs, important hardware elements for future recovery experiments. A statement released by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), CACL’s parent company, declared the first flight of the Long March 12B a “complete success” in a post-launch statement.

“This launch adds another high-capacity commercial rocket to [China’s] fleet for large-scale Internet constellation networking missions,” CASC said. “No recovery tests were conducted during this mission; however, first-stage recovery tests are scheduled to be carried out at a later, opportune time.”

Satellites for one of these large-scale Internet constellations rode to space aboard the Long March 12B,...