Why China Keeps Winning in Space

The bright light of SpaceX obscures the general picture

The second launch of LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 rocket has concluded with a successful first stage landing, although there are some reports that a post-landing fire damaged the booster. Regardless, for a second flight and second landing attempt this is impressive - SpaceX had a whole blooper reel worth of landing mishaps to get the Falcon 9 to where it is today.

Zhuque-3 landing. Credit: LandSpace

This private launch vehicle follows the successful recovery of a Long March 10B first stage by the state-owned launch company CALT. China now has two separate entities demonstrably capable of recovering a rocket, and nobody else outside the United States is close to the capability. China is also considered a serious competitor for the US in getting back to the Moon, and will be soon launching their Chang’e 7 probe to the lunar South Pole, which will no doubt cause much handwringing in Washington. It remains the fact that SpaceX retains an overwhelming lead in reusable rocket technology and mass delivered to orbit. Even with the advantages they provide, Chinese competition in space is routinely raised in political debates around NASA.

What western lead remains in spaceflight is almost entirely due to one company, SpaceX, and downstream of that one man, Elon Musk - whose journey to being a space magnate is unlikely to be repeatable. It is worth taking a step back and looking at how we got to this point.

The Crown in the Gutter

In 1969, when the US amazed the world by landing men on the Moon, China was a desperately poor economic basket case. Reeling from the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and suffering under the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, it had a GDP/capita of around $100, on par with that of Ethiopia. Only a handful of Soviet-derived nuclear weapons and a massive conscript army let it rank as a power at all. At the time someone suggesting that China might challenge the US for the Moon would be dismissed out of hand.