A historic drop marks China's first successful recovery of a large rocket's first stage.

At 12:15 PM Beijing Time today, China's new-generation large liquid rocket Long March 10B ignited and lifted off from Launch Pad 2 of the Hainan Commercial Spaceport, successfully sending its payload into the predetermined orbit, marking a flawless inaugural flight.

Beyond the launch mission, another experiment on this rocket has drawn widespread attention: first-stage core recovery.

In the South China Sea, 430 kilometers downrange from the launch site, the mission-completed core first stage flew back, descended vertically, and landed steadily into the giant net deployed by the offshore platform "Pilot".

Standing 36 meters tall, this net is mounted on a vessel with a full-load displacement of 25,000 tons, purpose-built to catch rockets.

Net-capture of Long March 10B's core first stage | Weibo @Aerospace Dream Chaser

This single catch set two new records. China has become the second country globally, after the United States, to complete the flight verification of core first-stage recovery for a large liquid launch vehicle. And catching a rocket with a net is a world's first.

Anthropomorphic illustration of Long March 10B's core first stage net capture | stainless_squid

Why Recover Rockets?

The most immediate reason is cost reduction.

To draw an analogy: an airliner flying from Beijing to Shanghai only needs refueling and routine checks after landing before it can take off for the next trip. Traditional rockets cannot do this, as they are discarded after a single use. The first stage pushes the payload into the sky, then crashes and becomes obsolete once its mission is complete, requiring a brand-new rocket to be built for every subsequent launch. This is equivalent to throwing away an entire airliner after each flight, and the cost is self-evident.

Yet the first stage happens to be one of the most expensive components of the entire rocket: it is the largest in size, equipped with the most engines, and features the most complex technology. If it can be recovered, inspected, and reused for multiple flights — even dozens of times — the cost per launch can be drastically reduced when amortized across all missions.

Apart from saving costs, there is another major benefit: speed. Building a large rocket typically takes months, if not years. A disposable model means you can only launch one rocket after it is fully manufactured, leaving the launch tempo completely constrained by production speed. If recovered stages can be reused, the launch cadence can be significantly accelerated.

This path has already been proven feasible: SpaceX's Falcon 9 in the United States, through repeated first-stage reuse, has achieved over 100 launches per year.

For these reasons, reusability has become the core direction of global rocket R&D in recent years. While the goal is universal, the technical approaches are not limited to one.

Why Net-Based Recovery?

The current most mainstream recovery method globally, represented by SpaceX's Falcon 9, allows the rocket to land back on its own "legs". During the return phase, the first stage deploys four large hydraulic landing legs, and finally descends vertically onto a land-based or offshore recovery platform.

Falcon 9 first stage landing on offshore recovery platform | SpaceX

This system is highly mature, but it comes with an unavoidable tradeoff: the four large landing legs, paired with complex supporting buffer mechanisms, substantially increase the rocket's dry mass.

The rocket has to carry this extra weight from the moment of ignition, which only serves a purpose seconds before landing. Every second spent carrying this dead weight wastes valuable payload capacity. The sturdier the landing legs are built, the less payload the rocket can carry.

Falcon 9 landing legs | Ken Kremer

Long March 10B takes a completely different approach.

For the vast majority of its return trajectory, there is no fundamental difference from other reusable rockets. After stage separation, the core first stage deploys its grid fins — lattice-shaped small control surfaces mounted on the rocket body, designed to adjust flight attitude in the atmosphere — reignites its engines to decelerate, and heads toward the waiting "Pilot" vessel in the South China Sea.

The Pilot is not idle either: its dynamic positioning system counteracts wind and waves to hold the vessel steadily in the predetermined recovery zone.

The critical difference lies in the final step. Where Falcon 9 extends its legs to prepare for touchdown, Long March 10B does not. It flies above the platform, reduces its horizontal velocity to zero, then descends vertically. On the platform, a rope net arranged in a "#" (grid) shape catches the arresting rods protruding from the rocket body the moment they make contact. The rope net and buffer system gradually dissipate the rocket's downward momentum, eliminating its falling speed incrementally before holding it securely.

Schematic diagram of rocket net recovery system | China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology

This process strongly resembles carrier-based aircraft arrested landing. Fighters landing on an aircraft carrier are abruptly brought to a halt when their tail hook catches the arresting cables on the deck. Long March 10B is also "arrested" to stop — the only difference is that the fighter approaches horizontally, while the rocket descends vertically.

With this design, the weight of the landing system is transferred from the rocket to the offshore platform. The rocket only needs to retain several lightweight arresting rods, and all the saved mass can be allocated to increased payload capacity.

Why Was It Successful On The Inaugural Flight?

A rocket making its very first flight not only reached orbit smoothly, but also completed a net-based recovery that no other nation had ever achieved before.

This success was not due to luck.

Prior to today, almost every single step of this entire sequence had been individually rehearsed.

Back in the ground test phase, the first stage's seven engines underwent two static ignition tests: the rocket was fixed on the launch pad, ignited without lifting off, to verify its performance under nearly thousands of tons of thrust when all seven engines operated simultaneously — even the reignition sequence for return deceleration was fully rehearsed on the ground.

An even more critical rehearsal took place on February 11 this year. China conducted the low-altitude demonstration and verification test for the Long March 10 launch vehicle system (the maximum dynamic pressure escape flight test for the Mengzhou crewed spacecraft system) at the Wenchang Space Launch Site, marking the first flight of the Long March 10 series in its prototype stage.

Long March 10 low-altitude demonstration test and Mengzhou spacecraft maximum dynamic pressure escape flight test conducted in February this year | Xinhua News Agency

During that test, the first stage flew up to an altitude of around 105 kilometers before returning, adjusting its attitude and decelerating all the way, nearly hovering just 5 meters above the sea surface before engine shutdown. The rocket body then splashed vertically into the predetermined sea area, with the splashdown point located right near the Pilot vessel that was there to support the rehearsal.

This marked the first time a Chinese rocket first stage achieved controlled splashdown at sea.

In other words, apart from the final "catching by the net" action, the entire recovery process was fully validated back in February: could the engines reliably reignite multiple times during return? Could the rocket body withstand the high temperatures and impact loads during reentry? Could the navigation and control system guide the rocket precisely to the recovery vessel? All these questions received definitive answers during that test.

Prototype rocket splashes down near recovery vessel | Xinhua News Agency

Therefore, it is more accurate to say that Long March 10B did not just succeed on its first flight — it brought a performance that had been rehearsed countless times to the official stage, only adding the final missing action: landing in the net.

What Does This Mean For The Future?

The first beneficiary of this success is China's crewed lunar landing program.

China plans to achieve a crewed lunar landing before 2030 | CMS

Long March 10B is not a standalone rocket. It belongs to the entire Long March 10 family, which is tasked with sending Chinese astronauts to the Moon by 2030.

As the first member of the family to reach space, all the key technologies validated by Long March 10B today — such as multiple engine reignitions and return flight control — will become shared assets for the entire series, accumulating critical technical and engineering experience for the development of subsequent Long March 10 variants.

The other major beneficiary is the rapidly expanding satellite internet constellation.

China's low Earth orbit satellite internet is accelerating its construction | CCTV News

China's low Earth orbit constellations such as the "Guowang" national satellite internet and "Qianfan" constellation are about to enter the large-scale deployment phase. These constellations are planned to consist of tens of thousands of satellites, and launching them all into orbit relies on the two core advantages we mentioned earlier: low cost and high launch frequency.

Long March 10B has a LEO payload capacity of no less than 16 tons in its recoverable configuration. Once it achieves stable reusability in the future, its launch cost will be further reduced, making it perfectly suited to meet the launch demand of large constellation deployment.

Zhuque-3 Y2 rocket first stage undergoing static fire test; the rocket will launch and conduct recovery experiments in the near future | LandSpace

Moreover, Long March 10B is just the vanguard.

Multiple other reusable rockets in China are already on the development roadmap, and flight recovery tests for models such as Zhuque-3 will be carried out sequentially. It is foreseeable that the cycle of rockets landing, being inspected, and launching again will gradually become a routine part of China's space industry.

Today, a rocket was caught by the giant net on its very first return. In the future, returning will become the norm — and so will launching.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "Guokr" (ID: Guokr42), authored by Bai Ge Zheng Liu, and published with authorization from 36Kr.