A partially reusable Chinese rocket just made a surprise debut.
China launched its Long March 12B vehicle for the first time ever on Monday (June 1), sending it up from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert.
The liftoff occurred without warning: China did not issue airspace closure notices ahead of time, eschewing a safety practice commonly employed by launch operators.
In another surprise, the Long March 12B carried functional payloads on its first-ever flight — two satellites for the Qianfan (“Thousand Sails“) internet megaconstellation, a Chinese version of SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Those spacecraft reached low Earth orbit successfully, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced in an update yesterday.
The Long March 12B looks a lot like SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9. Both are two-stage rockets that stand about 230 feet (70 meters) tall, with a reusable first stage powered by nine engines. The Long March 12B’s engines burn kerosene and liquid oxygen, just as the Falcon 9’s Merlins do.
But CASC didn’t try to land the Long March 12B’s booster on yesterday’s debut. That milestone “will be carried out at a later date,” CASC officials wrote in the update. (SpaceX has landed Falcon 9 first stages more than 600 times to date.)
The Long March 12B isn’t China’s only foray into rocket reusability. CASC also flies the Long March 12A, which attempted a booster landing on its debut flight this past December. The landing failed, but the rocket reached orbit as planned.
The private Zhuque-3 rocket, built and operated by the Beijjing-based company Landspace, performed similarly on its own debut in December, reaching orbit but failing to stick the landing.
Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3 also features a reusable first stage. That rocket has one flight under its belt — a launch on April 3 of this year that ended in failure. (Tianlong-3 is also famous in spaceflight circles for accidentally launching during a static-fire test in June 2024.)
Other private, partially reusable Chinese launchers are in the works as well, including CAS Space’s Kinetica-2, Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1 and Deep Blue Aerospace’s Nebula 1.