Landspace Attempts Zhuque-3 Vertical Landing Tonight
Landspace's second Zhuque-3 launch is set for 01:45 CEST. The first stage is meant to touch down on its legs in Gansu, eight months after it exploded during the first attempt.
Chinese private company Landspace will attempt, on the night between Monday and Tuesday, to launch the Zhuque-3 rocket for a second time and bring its first stage back down vertically, on its own legs. Liftoff from launch pad 96B at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center is scheduled for August 10 at 23:45 GMT, which is 01:45 on August 11 Central European Summer Time, or 07:45 Beijing time. The pad sits in the Dongfeng commercial spaceflight zone in northwestern China, and the landing platform lies downrange, in Minqin county, Gansu province.
The flight is designated Y2 and comes eight months after the first attempt. Zhuque-3 lifted off on December 3, 2025: the second stage delivered its payload to orbit without issue, but the first stage exploded during the final braking burn, short of its intended landing point. China’s Xinhua news agency said at the time that abnormal combustion had occurred, which prevented a soft touchdown. Three days later, Landspace reported what it had actually taken away from the attempt: confirmation of the heat shield, the aerodynamic layout and the attitude control system during supersonic reentry, along with the accuracy of the guidance algorithm through the engine relight phase and the glide phase.
What happens to the first stage after separation
Zhuque-3 is a two-stage, stainless-steel rocket standing 65.9 meters tall, 4.5 meters in diameter, with a total mass of about 550 tons. The first stage runs on nine TQ-12A engines producing a combined 7,200 kilonewtons of thrust at sea level, while the second stage carries a single TQ-15A engine rated at 944.4 kilonewtons in vacuum. All of them burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen, the same propellant pair SpaceX uses on Starship.
After separation, the first stage does not fall freely. It relights part of its engines, brakes, steers itself with grid fins and a cold-gas system, and comes down on four legs. The manufacturer says the structure is built for up to twenty flights. Space.com lists the rocket’s payload to low Earth orbit at 18,300 kilograms when the first stage is recovered, and rates its capabilities alongside the Falcon 9.
None of this is improvised. Landspace rehearsed the procedure on a dedicated test stage: on January 19, 2024, in a roughly sixty second flight to an altitude of about 350 meters, it landed with an accuracy of 2.4 meters and touched down at 0.75 meters per second. Eight months later, on September 11, 2024, the same test stage flew for about 200 seconds, climbed past 10 kilometers, and shut down and relit its engine in midair, something no other Chinese manufacturer had managed at that point.
China’s fourth attempt, and a different method
This is the fourth time China has tried to land the first stage of an orbital rocket:
- Landspace’s Zhuque-3, December 2025, booster lost during landing
- the debut flight of the Long March 12A, which also ended in a fireball
- Long March 10B, July 10, 2026, successful
- Zhuque-3 Y2, tonight
July’s success came through a different method: the Long March 10B booster was caught in a net mounted on a vessel, which made China the second country to recover an orbital first stage. Landspace is not catching anything, it is relying on engine braking and landing legs, the approach SpaceX developed for the Falcon 9. For comparison, we recently reported on how Elon Musk’s team is pulling Starship debris out of the Indian Ocean, a reminder that even the most experienced player in this field does not have every stage under control.
The last major check before launch took place on June 29, 2026, when the Y2 stage carried out a static engine firing in the Dongfeng zone. The company said afterward:
All systems operated normally, and the test data and results matched expectations, confirming the correctness and consistency of the systems and laying a solid foundation for the upcoming flights.
A static fire test is run on a tethered rocket with full tanks, and it shows that the engines and their controls work at the moment of ignition. It says nothing about how the stage behaves entering the denser layers of the atmosphere, which is where the problem occurred last December.
What this flight will not prove
The payload’s identity has not been disclosed. The mission is described as a test flight to low Earth orbit, so the focus is on the vehicle itself, not on what it is carrying. Landspace’s plans include the Haolong cargo shuttle for resupplying the Tiangong space station and launches for the Guowang broadband constellation, but both jobs call for a more powerful version, Zhuque-3E, with nine TQ-12B engines, a length of 76.2 meters and a liftoff mass of about 660 tons.
A successful landing tonight would show that Landspace can bring a booster down, not that it can fly the same one again. Those are two different things: a stage has to survive inspection, refurbishment and another flight after touchdown, and no Chinese orbital booster has done that yet. A failure, on the other hand, would mark the second loss of the same type of stage in two attempts, which would push back timelines for the whole program. Landspace is broadcasting the launch through its official channels, and weather conditions at the pad and in the landing zone could still shift the schedule.
