Half-year review of the commercial rocket industry: 97% of the funds flow to less than 3% of the companies
The industry consolidation is far more severe than imagined.
In the first half of 2026, the divergence in China's commercial rocket industry became more pronounced.
The total financing amount in the first half of the year exceeded that of the whole of last year, but 97% of the capital flows to less than 3% of the companies.
The total number of experienced system engineers for liquid rockets nationwide is still in the triple digits.
What's more, a more realistic problem lies at the launch end: there is currently only one universal liquid launch pad that can be used by enterprises without exclusive stations.
I. Total financing reached 15.13 billion yuan in half a year, 97% flowing to leading enterprises
Let's first look at the launch background.
In the first half of 2026, China completed 44 space launches, including 30 commercial launch missions and 17 commercial rocket launches. There were a total of 154 launches worldwide in the first half of the year, with the increment mainly coming from China. The United States completed 95 launches in the same period, 1 less year-on-year.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 has maintained an average of 12 to 13 launches per month, with its launch capacity operating near a high level; Starship only flew once in the first half of the year, and the booster recovery failed, and it was not resumed until 47 days after the FAA grounded it.
The window of opportunity for China's commercial rockets did not appear out of thin air. The structural change in global launch supply is leaving a clearer catch-up space for Chinese enterprises.
The divergence on the capital side is even more obvious.
According to data from RuiShou Analysis, in the first quarter of 2026, China's commercial aerospace financing reached 8.02 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.6 times. A total of 89 financing events occurred in the first half of the year, with a total financing amount of 15.13 billion yuan, which has exceeded the total 13.94 billion yuan for the whole year of 2025, reaching 70.6% of the historical peak of 21.42 billion yuan in 2024.
However, the growth in total financing cannot hide the structural divergence.
The top 20 enterprises in the first quarter took 7.78 billion yuan, accounting for 97%. Among them, i-Space's D++ round raised 5.037 billion yuan, accounting for 62.8% of the total financing in the first quarter.
From the perspective of historical cumulative data, among the total industry financing of more than 62 billion yuan, the top 24 enterprises account for 97%, and the remaining more than 570 small and medium-sized enterprises account for less than 3% in total.
The industry is not simply facing "financing difficulties", in fact, financing for mid-tier enterprises has basically stalled.
From 2024 to 2026, more than 70 small and medium-sized enterprises have stalled or been deregistered. Investment banking sources predict that in the next 1 to 3 years, more than 40% of enterprises may exit the market.
The round structure is also reinforcing this trend.
According to statistics from RuiShou Analysis, there were 193 financing events from 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, including 85 Series A rounds, accounting for 44%; 15 Series D rounds and above, accounting for 8%. New companies are still entering the market, leading companies continue to absorb capital, and the middle tier is relatively weak. The industry presents a typical "hourglass-shaped" capital structure.
In addition, the source of funds is also changing quietly. The proportion of capital contribution from state-owned background institutions has increased from 41% in 2024 to 59.8% in 2025. Almost all financing of more than 1 billion yuan per transaction is led by state-owned capital. State-owned capital prefers mature, heavy-asset projects with proven delivery records, and the companies that can enter its vision are mainly leading rocket enterprises.
Another familiar trend is that the IPO channel is also opening up.
LandSpace has entered the inquiry stage on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market, and its review status was resumed on June 29, with a planned fundraising of 7.5 billion yuan, applying the fifth set of standards for the STAR Market; CAS Space has also entered the inquiry stage, with a planned fundraising of 4.18 billion yuan, applying for listing via the second set of standards relying on its formed revenue scale.
Although the listing paths are different, LandSpace and CAS Space are both core candidates competing for the title of "first commercial rocket stock" in the market.
In addition to the two enterprises that have entered the inquiry stage, companies that have completed tutoring and filing such as Galactic Energy, Tianbing Technology, and i-Space are also sprinting to the capital market.
Among them, Tianbing Technology is a typical sample. After the first flight failure of Tianlong-3 in April, news of a new round of financing in July spread in the market, and its post-investment valuation increased significantly compared with the 22.5 billion yuan in the 2025 Series D round.
This shows that the pricing focus of leading capital is shifting from the success or failure of a single launch to system capabilities. Long-term indicators such as engine test run accumulation, production base capacity, and team thickness have a greater impact on valuation than a single flight result. Of course, the re-flight of Tianlong-3 in the second half of the year has also become the focus of the industry.
Another structural change worthy of attention is that capital enthusiasm in the satellite application field is increasing.
The number of satellite application financing events in the first half of the year was 49, surpassing the 46 events in rocket manufacturing for the first time. Investment logic is beginning to extend from "making hardware" to "using data". But in terms of amount, rocket manufacturing still dominated the capital flow in the first half of the year with 12.583 billion yuan.
The reason is very simple: the demand for low-orbit constellation networking is still being released, and without low-cost, high-frequency orbit entry capabilities, the commercial closed loop of satellite applications is still hanging in the air.
Capital voting has been completed. Whether an enterprise can get capital depends less and less on its concept, but more on its delivery record and system capabilities.
The "rising valuation" of Tianbing Technology is not a universal treatment. In the entire industry, there are very few companies that can make capital continue to pay a premium for "system capabilities in trial and error".
II. Talent gap reaches 475,000, leading companies begin self-cultivation
At the beginning of 2026, Cao Meng, Vice President of Yuanwang Space, said a sentence at an industry conference:
"What is the most scarce resource in China's commercial aerospace now? It's not money, we are short of talents, especially people who are experienced in developing liquid launch vehicles. Now all experienced technical personnel working on liquid rockets in Beijing, including system engineers and technical personnel of all key systems, are being frantically recruited, which is because our talent pool is too small."
This sentence soon spread in the industry.
The talent shortage in commercial aerospace is not a new problem. The total number of industry talents is about 300,000, of which core R&D personnel are less than 75,000, and core R&D talents in the rocket and satellite manufacturing field are less than 20,000. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology predicts that the total industry gap is 475,000.
The real problem is that the growth rate of enterprises is much faster than the talent supply. 83 new commercial aerospace enterprises were added in 2025, with a year-on-year increase of 277%, hitting a peak in the past decade. By the first half of 2026, the scissors gap between the number of enterprises and talent supply has been significantly narrowed.
The most scarce positions are concentrated in chief engineer of liquid rocket engine, rocket recovery technical post and launch vehicle system engineer.
Risfond's "2025 Commercial Aerospace Salary Guide" shows that the median salary of chief engineers of liquid rocket engines is 820,000 yuan per year;
The annual salary increase for rocket recovery technical posts is 24%, the highest in the entire industry;
The total number of launch vehicle system engineers nationwide is no more than three digits, and the frequency of headhunter contact is more than 3 times that of the conventional high-tech industry.
Taking Guangzhou as an example, there are less than 15 engineers in the city with experience in liquid rocket engine thrust chamber design.
Talent flow mainly follows several paths:
The first path is the flow of talents from the state-owned aerospace system to private enterprises.
In 2016, 428 people resigned from the Eighth Academy of Aerospace Science and Technology Group alone to join the private sector. By 2025, technical talents flowing from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation to commercial aerospace accounted for about 30% of the new talents in the industry.
The reason for the flow is not just salary. The annual salary of 200,000 yuan in the state-owned system may become 500,000 to 800,000 yuan in private enterprises, with a span of 2 to 4 times. But more importantly, the career growth curve and the opportunity to participate in a complete launch vehicle project.
In the state-owned system, many people need ten years to enter a complete launch vehicle project cycle; in private enterprises, this process may be compressed to two or three years. Combined with 15% to 25% equity incentives, leading companies have significantly enhanced their ability to lock in core talents.
The second path is talent spillover between private enterprises.
LandSpace is a typical sample. As one of the earlier established private rocket companies, LandSpace has objectively cultivated and delivered a group of key talents to the industry. For example, Kang Yonglai left the CTO position of LandSpace and founded Tianbing Technology, Shu Chang separated from the founding team of LandSpace and founded One Space, Ge Minghe left the position of Vice President of LandSpace and co-founded Xiandeng Aerospace.
On July 28, 2025, LandSpace changed 14 directors, supervisors and senior executives in one day, with 7 people exiting. The governance adjustment on the eve of IPO also reflects the company's reconfiguration of talent structure at different stages.
The third path is the entry of cross-industry talents.
Zhang Changwu entered LandSpace from the financial industry, Yao Song entered Oriental Space from the AI chip industry and then left, which shows that commercial rockets do not only absorb talents with traditional aerospace background. However, the closer to launch vehicle development and launch delivery, the more non-traditional background talents need to go through the screening of the engineering system.
We can get a glimpse of the intensity of this talent war from salary data.
Risfond's "2025 Commercial Aerospace Salary Guide" shows that the top-level talents in commercial aerospace, who mainly have master's or doctoral background and more than 5 years of core experience, have a salary range of 800,000 to 1.2 million yuan;
The core layer, including system, guidance, payload and other positions, has a salary range of 500,000 to 800,000 yuan;
The backbone layer, including structure, thermal control and propulsion, has a salary range of 350,000 to 550,000 yuan; the salary for grassroots process, assembly and test positions is 180,000 to 300,000 yuan.
Horizontally, the median monthly salary of AI large model positions exceeds 40,000 yuan, and that of aerospace system engineers is about 27,900 yuan. The traffic and salary attractiveness of commercial aerospace in the talent market is still weaker than that of the AI industry. However, the 24% annual salary increase for rocket recovery technical posts shows that the supply-demand relationship is rapidly correcting this gap.
The campus recruitment market is also releasing new signals.
All the first batch of 2026 campus recruits of Tianbing Technology have entered core R&D positions, with 97.1% of them holding master's or doctoral degrees, 74.3% of them graduating from 985 universities, and more than 90% of them coming from the Seven National Defense Universities and top domestic engineering universities, including Harbin Institute of Technology, Beihang University, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, etc. The average starting salary for master's degree campus recruits in core positions is over 300,000 yuan, combined with long-term equity incentives.
Leading enterprises such as LandSpace and GalaxySpace also show similar characteristics. Top students are concentrating in a small number of companies, and small and medium-sized enterprises are left behind at the starting point of talent reserve.
This also shows that the competition mode of leading companies has gone beyond "poaching people with high salaries" and turned to "simultaneously introducing and cultivating talents". A complete launch vehicle system, full-cycle engineering practice from design to delivery, internal expert mentoring, joint laboratories and local talent policies are forming new attractiveness.
After communicating with relevant persons in charge of Tianbing Technology, Xindong Wuji learned that its internal talent cultivation system has formed three levels:
The first is the practical growth carrier. Relying on the complete development process of the Tianlong-3 launch vehicle, young R&D personnel can cover the full-cycle engineering practice from scheme design, single unit development, system integration to ground test run and flight test — this complete chain of experience is difficult to obtain in other small and medium-sized rocket companies;
The second is the regular technology inheritance mechanism. Through technical inheritance methods such as internal expert mentoring, fault zeroing review and design review, the company systematically precipitates engineering experience and reduces the risk of knowledge fault caused by the loss of core personnel;
The third is the collaborative cultivation of industry-university-research. It co-builds joint laboratories with universities such as Beihang University, carries out collaborative research on cutting-edge technologies such as recoverable rockets and deep throttling of engines, and simultaneously implements internship training and targeted talent delivery.
The core logic of this system is to let high-end talents grow in a real engineering environment, while reducing the dependence on a single expert through a systematic mechanism.
Commercial aerospace has entered its 11th year, and the first batch of self-cultivation backbone talents have emerged. The fresh graduates who joined private rocket companies ten years ago have now served as deputy chief designers or chief designers.
There is a very interesting sentence in the industry: "Having flight experience makes a difference." The market valuation of engineers who have participated in complete flight missions and engineers who only have ground development experience is widening.
The core of talent competition has also shifted from "who can poach talents" to "who can continuously cultivate talents", and the talent barrier is becoming part of the technical barrier.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, the difficulty in recruiting people, retaining people, and slow engineering iteration will further slow down the launch vehicle development rhythm, and ultimately affect financing and orders in turn.
III. After the first flight, can continuous success be achieved?
In the first half of 2026, China's commercial rockets presented a state of three parallel routes.
Solid rockets have