Stainless steel rocket body + chopstick recycling, the Chinese version of Starship is finally here.

On the path of catching up with Elon Musk's SpaceX, China's commercial space industry has finally seen someone challenging the most difficult route.

Recently, multiple media outlets reported that Yushi Space, located in Zhuzhou, Hunan, completed a 200 million yuan Pre - A+ round of financing. Compared with the financing itself, what the outside world is more concerned about is the rocket in its hands.

Its independently developed AS - 1 launch vehicle is planned to be transported to Wenchang, Hainan in the second half of 2026, awaiting its maiden flight. The most special thing about this rocket is that it almost completely replicates the core technical route of SpaceX's Starship: a stainless - steel rocket body, a liquid oxygen methane engine, and a "chopstick" capture arm for recovery.

In other words, since its establishment, Yushi Space has been aiming at the most radical and difficult path in the commercial space industry.

In May 2024, Tang Wen, Tian Jichao, and Zhu Xinwen jointly founded Yushi Space. In less than two years, the company's cumulative financing reached 500 million yuan, and it quickly completed the initial closed - loop from R & D, manufacturing to final assembly, rapidly becoming one of the most watched new players in China's commercial space industry.

However, the difficulty of this route is also among the highest in the global space industry.

In the past decade, in order to launch the Starship into space, SpaceX has experienced numerous explosions, malfunctions, disintegrations, and delays. Elon Musk burned tens of billions of dollars and utilized the top aerospace industrial resources in the United States to achieve the still - immature Starship system today.

China's stainless - steel rockets are only just starting at the starting line.

What Yushi Space really faces is not just a maiden flight, but a challenge to an entire industrial system's capabilities: materials, welding, engines, automated manufacturing, recovery control, and ultimately large - scale reuse.

China's commercial space industry is entering a new stage, but this pursuit is destined to be long and difficult.

The "Chinese Solution" to Compete with Starship

Yushi Space's technical route has a strong SpaceX flavor from the very beginning.

The stainless - steel rocket body, the liquid oxygen methane engine, and the "chopstick" recovery system are the three core technologies of the Starship system. Yushi Space does not shy away from this. According to a report by LatePost, co - founder Zhu Xinwen once said bluntly, "We don't shy away from replicating SpaceX. Good technical routes will resonate. The difficult part is localization, and it's localization that is independent of the global supply chain system."

This statement actually points out the most realistic problem in China's commercial space industry today.

Everyone knows that SpaceX is on the right track, but there is a gap between knowing the direction and actually reaching the end, which is the industrial capability.

In the past few decades, the global space industry has long chosen aluminum alloy not because of technological conservatism, but because it is almost the "standard answer" in the traditional rocket industry. Aviation - grade aluminum alloy is lightweight, has mature processes, and is stable in anti - corrosion. Its density is only about 2.7 g/cm³, and its lightweight advantage is extremely obvious.

The rocket industry is highly sensitive to weight. For every 1 - kilogram reduction in structure, it often means higher payload capacity, lower fuel consumption, and more controllable overall costs.

In contrast, the density of stainless steel is close to 7.9 g/cm³, almost three times that of aluminum alloy. Taking the AS - 1 as an example, under the same size, the stainless - steel rocket body is about 20 tons heavier than the aluminum alloy solution. This 20 - ton increase is not just about being "heavier". It means that the engine needs to provide greater thrust, more fuel needs to be loaded, the structural burden is further magnified, and the difficulty of the entire system is raised.

This is why the space industry has always regarded "weight reduction" as the core logic in the past. But Elon Musk does the opposite.

In the era of reusability, cost begins to outweigh extreme lightweighting. Stainless steel is cheap, heat - resistant, high - strength, and has a fast processing speed. Compared with carbon fiber and aviation - grade aluminum alloy, it is more like a material suitable for industrial production.

Elon Musk later repeatedly emphasized that what will truly determine the competitiveness of rockets in the future is not the extreme performance in the laboratory, but the manufacturing efficiency. SpaceX's ultimate decision to abandon carbon fiber and switch to stainless steel is essentially using the thinking of the automotive industry to rebuild rockets.

But the real difficulty has never been "choosing stainless steel", but how to actually build a stainless - steel rocket.

The AS - 1 is about 70 meters long and 4.2 meters in diameter. The entire rocket body is composed of a large number of thin - walled stainless - steel cylinders spliced together. One of the biggest problems with stainless steel is that heat is easily concentrated. Its thermal conductivity is only about one - third of that of aluminum alloy. During the welding process, problems such as stress concentration, structural deformation, and weld cracking are very likely to occur. More importantly, the thickness of the AS - 1 rocket body shell is less than 1 millimeter, which means that the welding process is almost like "welding paper".

When LatePost visited Yushi Space's Zhuzhou factory, it mentioned that the total length of the welds on a rocket shell can reach more than ten kilometers. Under high - pressure flight conditions, a 1 - millimeter - diameter air hole may cause damage to the rocket body, so the welding requirements are almost as strict as those for submarine manufacturing.

Currently, most of Yushi Space's welders come from heavy - industry systems such as CRRC Zhuzhou. They have welded high - speed trains and excavators, but after entering the rocket factory, they still need six months of training before they can officially start working. Even so, it still takes at least five hours for a mature engineer to weld a 15 - meter - long weld, and it takes 20 skilled craftsmen two months to complete the entire rocket body.

SpaceX has now automated some of its welding processes, and engineers can complete a rocket body in about two weeks. Behind this gap is not the workers' proficiency, but the maturity of the industrial system.

What's more troublesome is that the problems with the stainless - steel route are far from just welding.

Rockets are in long - term contact with liquid oxygen, methane, and the extreme high - altitude environment. Once rust occurs, it may cause valve jamming, weld cracking, or even structural failure. Even SpaceX has to conduct long - term anti - rust detection and maintenance. At the same time, the liquid oxygen methane engine that is matched with the stainless - steel rocket body is still in the stage of continuous iteration.

Liquid oxygen methane is considered the mainstream direction for the next - generation reusable rockets, but the relevant engines in China are still in the stage of a large number of test runs and repeated optimizations. What's more radical about Yushi Space is that it also wants to challenge the "chopstick" recovery simultaneously.

In December 2025, Yushi Space completed the first full - scale ground verification test of a hundred - ton - class "chopstick" capture arm in China. However, there is a huge engineering gap between ground verification and real - world recovery. High - altitude wind fields, rocket body attitude deviations, thrust fluctuations, and structural vibrations will all affect the final capture accuracy, and the reliability of the capture arm system in turn depends on the structural stability of the rocket body.

This means that welding, the engine, and the recovery system are not three independent problems, but a highly coupled and complex engineering system. Any out - of - control link may lead to overall failure. This is why the Starship still explodes frequently to this day.

But precisely because of this, once this route is truly successful, the potential is very large.

The AS - 1 is about 70 meters long, with a take - off weight of about 570 tons. Its one - time low - Earth - orbit payload capacity can reach 15.7 tons, and the reusable payload capacity is about 10 tons. Yushi Space hopes to ultimately compress the launch cost to 20,000 yuan per kilogram, which is only about one - sixth of the current market average.

This goal sounds attractive, but the space industry doesn't reduce costs through PowerPoint presentations. It can only be achieved through repeated test flights, failures, and explosions.

The "Rocket - like Speed" in 20 Months

Yushi Space's growth rate in the past two years is quite rare even in China's rapidly evolving commercial space industry.

The company was founded in May 2024. In March 2025, it completed an angel - round financing of tens of millions of yuan. In May of the same year, it completed the angel + round. By the end of 2025, it completed a Pre - A round of financing of over 100 million yuan. In March 2026, it completed a 200 million yuan Pre - A+ round of financing. In less than two years, the cumulative financing has reached 500 million yuan.

Behind this financing rhythm actually reflects the collective anxiety of the entire industry.

What China's commercial space industry lacks most today is not stories, but a rocket system with low cost, large payload capacity, and reusability. In the past few years, although the domestic commercial space industry has been very active, most private rocket companies are still essentially at the "small - rocket" stage: limited payload capacity, limited launch frequency, limited commercialization space, and it is even more difficult to truly support the future large - scale low - Earth - orbit satellite networking needs.

What really changed the industry landscape of SpaceX is that it brought rockets into the era of industrial production for the first time.

It no longer develops rockets according to the logic of traditional space projects but starts to manufacture rockets according to the logic of industrial products, using assembly lines, rapid iteration, and large - scale production to reduce costs. To some extent, what SpaceX really disrupted the industry with is not just the recovery technology, but the fact that it made rockets have the characteristics of "industrial products" for the first time.

What Yushi Space is trying to replicate now is actually this path.

The Zhuzhou base in Hunan is the most crucial step in this process.

This factory, with a total investment of about 1.5 billion yuan and an area of about 54,000 square meters, is planned to have the capacity to produce 8 rockets per year in the future. For the commercial space industry, production capacity itself is competitiveness because what may truly determine the industry landscape in the future is not who can build a rocket first, but who can mass - produce rockets like building cars.

During the visit by LatePost, it was mentioned that in the factory workshop, workers were rolling 1 - meter - wide steel plates into circles and then welding them into 4.2 - meter - diameter rings, which were then spliced layer by layer into a rocket body as tall as a 20 - story building. There were a large number of rocket body components, welding fixtures, and dense inspection negatives piled up in the workshop. The whole scene is very much like the "Chinese version" of SpaceX's Starship base in Texas.

But in the space industry, the most difficult thing has never been "building it for the first time".

The real difficulty is how to build it stably, continuously, and at low cost.

Currently, although Yushi Space has mastered the core welding process, there is still a considerable distance from real industrial - scale consistency control.

To put it simply, each rocket may have different degrees of welding errors, so a large number of X - ray inspections are required for each section of the weld. Once a problem is found, the welded part often has to be cut off and re - welded.

This manufacturing logic means that there is still a long way to go before real large - scale production.

More importantly, in the end, what the commercial space industry competes on is not just whether a single rocket can fly, but whether it can form a stable, continuous, and low - cost manufacturing capability.

The reason why SpaceX can continuously reduce the launch cost essentially depends on a highly industrialized production system: automated welding, standardized manufacturing, high - frequency test flights, rapid iteration, and an increasingly mature supply - chain collaboration. And these capabilities cannot be established through a single financing or a single test flight. It requires long - term accumulation of a complete industrial system.

What Yushi Space is facing now is also the most typical problem at this stage.

On the one hand, aerospace - grade welding is not exactly the same as traditional heavy - industry welding. Although many workers come from heavy - industry systems such as high - speed trains and construction machinery, they still need long - term training to truly adapt to rocket manufacturing. On the other hand, key links such as automated welding, thin - wall structure control, and stainless - steel material modification still highly depend on a small number of core engineers.

This means that although Yushi Space has passed the "from 0 to 1" stage, there are still a large number of fragmented and complex engineering problems between it and the real industrial - scale production stage.

This is actually a microcosm of the entire Chinese commercial space industry.

Some people can now build rockets, but there is still a long way to go before a mature industrial system is truly established.

The "Space Android" Strategy

What Yushi Space really faces is not just a maiden flight, but whether it can, like SpaceX, make the stainless - steel rocket route truly successful.

The development path of the Starship is hardly smooth.

From the start of testing the prototype in 2019 to the explosion of SN1 during the cryogenic pressure test in 2020, the collapse of SN3 due to structural instability, and the disintegration of SN4 after static ignition, the Starship was almost always in a state of high - frequency failure in the early stage. Although SN8 completed most of the high - altitude test - flight maneuvers, it exploded during the landing phase due to insufficient fuel pressure. Subsequently, SN9, SN10, and SN11 failed one after another. SN10 even completed a soft landing but exploded again a few minutes later.

For those few years, SpaceX was almost "flying while exploding", and the launch site by the sea in Texas was once joked about as "setting off fireworks every day".

It wasn't until after 2023 that the overall Starship system gradually entered a relatively stable test stage. However, even so, during multiple orbital - class test flights from 2023 to 2025, problems such as stage separation failure, attitude loss of control, and re - entry disintegration still occurred frequently.

In other words, even a powerful company like SpaceX had to go through long - term, high - frequency, and controllable failure iterations before gradually approaching the boundary of the reusable system.

What Yushi Space is facing today is essentially the same kind of problem, just compressed into a shorter time frame.

Especially when simultaneously advancing the three technical paths of "stainless - steel rocket body + liquid oxygen methane engine + chopstick recovery", the system complexity is significantly magnified. Although the AS - 1 has completed some ground tests and the static ignition of the second stage, there are still a large number of engineering uncertainties before its real maiden flight.

The reason is that many key problems in the rocket industry cannot be fully verified at the ground stage.

Simulation can cover the aerodynamic shape and theoretical loads, but the structural vibrations, thermal - mechanical coupling, fuel sloshing, and engine vibrations during real - world flight are typical multi - physical - field coupling problems, which often expose a large number of "unexpected" deviations during the flight. This is why SpaceX always adheres to the high - frequency test - flight strategy. For complex systems, the truly valuable data can only come from real - world flights.

A more realistic constraint is that even if the AS - 1 successfully completes its maiden flight in the future, it does not automatically mean a commercial closed - loop.

What really determines the path of the commercial space industry is whether the "reusability" is established.

The logic of traditional single - use rockets is that one mission corresponds to one loss, while the core of the reusable system is to continuously compress the marginal cost through recovery, inspection, and re - launch. This involves not only the capture accuracy or engine life but also the overall reconstruction of the manufacturing system, material system, and operation and maintenance system.

The reason why SpaceX can continuously reduce the launch cost essentially depends on the positive - feedback cycle between high - frequency reuse and industrialized manufacturing. Currently, China's commercial space industry as a whole is still in the stage of "single verification - single test flight" and has not yet entered this cycle structure.

At the same time, the external environment is also tightening. The regulatory intensity of rocket test runs, launch approvals, and recovery tests is continuously increasing. Any major failure may lead to a long - term