LandSpace is a Chinese commercial launch company founded in Beijing in 2015 by Zhang Changwu.[1][20] Its Zhuque-2 was the first rocket burning liquid methane and liquid oxygen to reach orbit, on July 12, 2023,[3][4] and on August 19, 2026 the first stage of its stainless-steel Zhuque-3 set down on landing legs about 390 kilometers from the pad, the first recovery of an orbital-class booster by any Chinese commercial company.[15][16] Across three rocket families, LandSpace has made 11 orbital launch attempts since 2018, eight of which reached orbit.[2][6][16]

The company was also the first private Chinese firm to attempt an orbital launch at all, with the small solid-fueled Zhuque-1 in October 2018.[1] It has since built its business around methane-fueled reusable rockets, flies the expendable Zhuque-2E alongside Zhuque-3, and has an initial public offering under review on Shanghai's STAR Market that seeks 7.5 billion yuan, about 1 billion dollars.[23]

Status as of August 2026

LandSpace's second Zhuque-3 flight, on August 19, 2026, reached orbit and brought its booster back intact. The rocket lifted off from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone at Jiuquan at 07:35 Beijing time, placed the Honghu-03 satellite in orbit, and landed its first stage on legs in Minqin County, Gansu province, about 390 kilometers downrange, roughly eight minutes after liftoff.[15][16] It was the first orbital-class booster recovery by a Chinese commercial company and the country's second overall, after the state-built Long March 10B's sea platform catch of July 10.[16] LandSpace says it aims to refly the recovered booster within six months.[19] Its IPO application on Shanghai's STAR Market, accepted on December 31, 2025, seeks 7.5 billion yuan, about 1 billion dollars, for reusable rocket development,[23] and its Wuxi factory, which began operating on May 27, 2026, is designed to support up to 20 Zhuque-3 launches a year once complete.[22]

History

Zhang Changwu founded LandSpace in Beijing in 2015.[20] Three years later it became the first private Chinese company to attempt an orbital launch: on October 27, 2018, the three-stage, solid-fueled Zhuque-1 lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center carrying Weilai-1, a small satellite for the state broadcaster CCTV. The first two stages performed, but the third lost attitude control and the payload fell short of orbit.[1][2]

LandSpace never flew another solid rocket. It dropped the Zhuque-1 line to concentrate on liquid engines burning methane and liquid oxygen, a propellant pairing suited to low-cost reusable boosters,[2][4] and its 80-tonne-class TQ-12 engine ran on a test stand in 2019.[20] The first methalox rocket to carry that work, Zhuque-2, failed on its debut on December 14, 2022, when the second stage's vernier thrusters shut down early and the payloads were lost.[5][6] The second attempt succeeded: on July 12, 2023, Zhuque-2 delivered a test payload to orbit, a first for methane-fueled rockets worldwide, and US Space Force tracking data confirmed an object in a 431 by 461 kilometer sun-synchronous orbit.[4] A third flight on December 9, 2023 carried three customer satellites, the rocket's first.[7]

Since then the company has flown the upgraded Zhuque-2E while developing the reusable Zhuque-3 and preparing a public listing to fund it.[23]

The Zhuque rocket family

LandSpace has flown four rocket configurations, all under the Zhuque name.

RocketFirst launchHeightPropulsionPayload to low Earth orbitStatus
Zhuque-1October 27, 2018 (failed)[1]19 meters[2]Three stages, solid fuel[2]300 kilograms[2]Retired after one flight[2]
Zhuque-2December 14, 2022 (failed); reached orbit July 12, 2023[4][5]49.5 meters[3]Two stages, methalox[3]6,000 kilograms to 200 kilometers[3]Retired after three flights[6]
Zhuque-2ENovember 27, 2024[8]47.3 meters[8]Two stages, methalox[8]Not published; has placed 2,800 kilograms into a 900-kilometer orbit[9]Active[10]
Zhuque-3December 3, 2025[14]66.1 meters[17]Two stages, methalox, reusable first stage[17]14,200 kilograms for the version flying in 2026;[26] design figures up to 21,300 expended[14]Active; first stage recovered August 19, 2026[16]

Zhuque-2 was 49.5 meters tall and 3.35 meters across, weighed 219 tonnes fueled, and lifted off on 268 tonnes of thrust from four TQ-12 engines. LandSpace quoted its capacity at 6 tonnes to a 200-kilometer orbit or 4 tonnes to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit.[3]

The Zhuque-2E replaced it from November 27, 2024, when the first one carried two Guangchuan satellites to orbit. The 2E swaps the base rocket's second-stage arrangement of a vacuum TQ-12 plus four vernier thrusters for a single TQ-15A engine with a movable nozzle, removing the hardware suspected in the 2022 failure.[8] The variant has flown five times: successes in November 2024 and May 2025, a failure on August 15, 2025, and successes in May and June 2026.[6] The 2025 failure traced to an electrical arc in a 450-volt power supply line that cost the second stage engine control, and the flight was terminated.[9] The return to flight on May 14, 2026 introduced a Block 2 version with a first stage stretched by about 8 meters, subcooled propellants, and a second stage that can reignite three times, and it placed a 2,800-kilogram payload into a 900-kilometer orbit.[9] A June 9, 2026 flight then delivered a direct-to-cell demonstration satellite for Shanghai Spacesail and a satellite for China Mobile,[10] but the discarded upper stage broke apart in orbit shortly afterward, adding an estimated 100 to 150 pieces of space debris to altitudes crossed by the International Space Station.[11]

Zhuque-3 is the company's answer to the Falcon 9: a two-stage methalox rocket with a first stage designed to land and fly again.[16] The flown vehicle stands 66.1 meters tall and 4.5 meters in diameter with a 5.2-meter fairing, and is built primarily from stainless steel, with the methane tank mounted above the oxygen tank to balance the stage for landing.[17][18] LandSpace's design figures for the type are 21,300 kilograms to low Earth orbit with the booster expended, 18,300 kilograms with a downrange landing, and 12,500 kilograms when the stage returns to the launch site.[14] The version flying in 2026 lifts less, 14.2 metric tons to low Earth orbit, short of those design numbers.[26]

Engines

LandSpace builds its own engine line, named Tianque (TQ), around the same methane and liquid oxygen combination as all of its rockets since Zhuque-1 (see how rockets work for why the propellant matters). The TQ-12, a gas-generator engine in the 80-tonne thrust class, first ran in 2019 and is described by the company as China's first methane rocket engine; four of them powered Zhuque-2's first stage, and a vacuum version plus four 8-tonne TQ-11 vernier engines drove its second stage.[3][6][20]

The current workhorse is the improved TQ-12A, which the company rates at 84.6 tonnes of sea-level thrust with a specific impulse of 293 seconds, restart capability, and thrust modulation; Xinhua reported the version on Zhuque-3 throttles between 40 and 110 percent of rated power.[17][21] Nine TQ-12As power the Zhuque-3 first stage, and single vacuum-optimized Tianque engines fly on the second stages of both Zhuque-2E (the TQ-15A) and Zhuque-3.[8][15][17]

Facilities

LandSpace is headquartered in Beijing's Yizhuang development zone and spreads manufacturing across eastern China.[20] Engines are produced and hot-fired in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, at a plant the company opened in 2018 and describes as China's first privately owned rocket factory.[3][20] Rockets are assembled in nearby Jiaxing at a facility completed in 2021, which LandSpace calls the country's first private liquid-rocket assembly plant.[20]

The newest site is in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, and is dedicated to Zhuque-3. It began operating on May 27, 2026 with a first-phase investment of 2.3 billion yuan, about 339 million dollars, and, according to state media, is China's first factory built to mass-produce stainless-steel rockets, sized to support up to 20 launches a year once complete.[22]

Launches take place from Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert, where LandSpace established its own methalox launch station in 2021 and now flies from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone.[15][20] Recovered Zhuque-3 boosters come down at a dedicated landing zone in Minqin County, Gansu province, about 390 kilometers downrange.[14][16]

Reusability program

The case for reuse is cost and cadence. The first stage accounts for roughly 70 percent of a rocket's cost, according to Chinese aerospace analysts, and officials frame recoverable boosters as a requirement for launching the country's planned broadband megaconstellations.[18][25] LandSpace part-owns one of the customers: Shanghai-based Hongqing Technology, 48 percent held by LandSpace, filed with the International Telecommunication Union in 2024 for a 10,000-satellite constellation called Honghu-3,[24] and the Honghu-03 satellite that Zhuque-3 carried in August 2026 is a prototype for it.[16][18]

The flight test campaign began with hops. On January 19, 2024, the single-engine Zhuque-3 VTVL-1 test vehicle rose about 350 meters over Jiuquan in a 60-second flight and landed 2.4 meters from its target.[12] On September 11, 2024, the same stainless-steel test article flew a 200-second profile to 10,002 meters, reignited its engine in mid-air for the first time in a Chinese vertical-landing test, and touched down on a pad 3.2 kilometers away.[13]

The first orbital attempt came on December 3, 2025. Zhuque-3 Y1 reached orbit, and the booster flew most of its return as planned, through high-altitude gliding, grid fin deployment, and the reentry burn, before combustion in the landing burn turned unstable and the stage was destroyed about 40 meters from its aim point.[14] LandSpace cut the number of engines firing in the landing burn and improved the stage's thermal protection for the next attempt.[15][16] On August 19, 2026, Zhuque-3 Y2 repeated the flight and completed it: stage separation at 137 seconds, orbital insertion of Honghu-03, and a vertical touchdown on four landing legs in Minqin County. A fire broke out in the booster's aft section after landing, but the company declared the test a full success in both insertion and recovery.[15][16][18]

The landing made LandSpace the fourth organization to recover an orbital-class booster from an orbital launch, after SpaceX, Blue Origin, and China's state-owned CASC, whose Long March 10B caught its first stage in a net at sea on July 10, 2026. It was the first such recovery on land in China and the first there on landing legs.[15][16][17] LandSpace had earlier said it wanted to reuse a recovered booster in the fourth quarter of 2026;[14] after the landing, it set a target of inspecting and reflying the stage within six months.[19] Chinese analysts describe booster recovery in the country as advancing on two tracks at once, through the state lunar program covered under CNSA and through commercial companies, of which LandSpace is so far the only one to land a booster.[16][18]

Funding and public listing

LandSpace has raised about 500 million dollars privately, including a 900 million yuan investment in December 2024 from a state-owned fund backing advanced manufacturing.[23] The company filed preliminary listing documents in late July 2025, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market accepted its IPO application on December 31, 2025. The offering seeks 7.5 billion yuan, roughly 1 billion dollars, all earmarked for reusable launch work: expanding production capacity, including the Wuxi plant, and funding continued vehicle development.[23] Zhuque-3 chief designer Dai Zheng told the state broadcaster CCTV that SpaceX's progress rested on absorbing the cost of repeated test flights, and that going public is how a Chinese company can fund the same speed of iteration.[23]

References

  1. Landspace fails to reach orbit with milestone private Chinese launch - SpaceNews, October 27, 2018.
  2. Zhuque-1 (ZQ-1) - Gunter's Space Page.
  3. China launches first globally successful orbital mission for methane-fueled rocket - LandSpace, July 2023.
  4. China's Landspace reaches orbit with methane-powered Zhuque-2 rocket - SpaceNews, July 12, 2023.
  5. Historic first launch of Chinese private methane-fueled rocket ends in failure - SpaceNews, December 14, 2022.
  6. Zhuque-2 (ZQ-2, LandSpace-2, LS-2) - Gunter's Space Page.
  7. ZhuQue-2 launches on third flight - NASASpaceflight, December 2023.
  8. Chang Zheng 12, ZhuQue-2E fly maiden missions; Hainan spaceport and mega constellations expand - NASASpaceflight, December 2024.
  9. Landspace launches improved Zhuque-2E, Long March 6A lofts new Qianfan satellite group - SpaceNews, May 2026.
  10. China's Zhuque-2E Y6 carrier rocket sends 2 new satellites into space - Xinhua, June 9, 2026.
  11. China conducts 4 launches in 3 days, but silence follows Kuaizhou-11 launch - SpaceNews, June 2026.
  12. China's Landspace conducts first VTVL test for reusable stainless steel rocket - SpaceNews, January 2024.
  13. Landspace completes 10-kilometer reusable rocket test, eyes 2025 orbital launch - SpaceNews, September 2024.
  14. Landspace targets Q2 for next Zhuque-3 orbital launch and recovery attempt - SpaceNews, February 18, 2026.
  15. LandSpace becomes first commercial Chinese company to land an orbital-class booster - Spaceflight Now, August 19, 2026.
  16. China's Landspace recovers booster with second orbital launch of Zhuque-3 rocket - SpaceNews, August 2026.
  17. China launches Zhuque-3, achieving its first rocket recovery on land - Xinhua, August 19, 2026.
  18. Zhuque-3 Y2 landmark recovery test marks China's dual-track reusable rocket development, aerospace experts say - Global Times, August 2026.
  19. Landspace aims to refly recovered Zhuque-3 booster within six months - SpaceNews, August 2026.
  20. About LandSpace - LandSpace.
  21. Tianque engine - LandSpace.
  22. Ground broken on Guangzhou Aerospace Town as China's commercial aerospace industry accelerates - Global Times, May 28, 2026.
  23. Landspace targets $1 billion for reusable rockets as IPO application accepted - SpaceNews, January 1, 2026.
  24. Chinese firm files plans for 10,000-satellite constellation - SpaceNews, May 2024.
  25. China's LandSpace plans more recovery test launches of its Zhuque-3 reusable rocket in Q2 of 2026: company - Global Times, February 2026.
  26. China successfully lands its Zhuque-3 rocket, rivaling Blue Origin and SpaceX - Scientific American, August 2026.