China has successfully launched its new Long March 10B rocket and recovered its first stage at sea. The achievement officially makes China only the second nation in history, following the United States, to successfully recover an orbital class rocket booster intact.
The maiden flight of the Long March 10B lifted off at 12:15 a.m. Eastern (0415 UTC) on Friday, July 10, 2026, from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site on the southern island province of Hainan. More than 90 minutes later, the state-owned main space contractor, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), confirmed the full success of the mission after an undisclosed satellite payload was cleanly deployed into its predetermined orbit.
However, the true centerpiece of the mission occurred just 11 minutes after liftoff, when the rocket’s massive first stage completed a controlled, powered descent over the South China Sea.
A New Era: Reusability Without Landing Legs
While American systems like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rely on heavy, deployable landing legs to touch down vertically on solid pads, CASC engineers chose a completely different technological path.
Approximately six minutes after stage separation, the five-meter-diameter booster performed a precise vertical descent toward a specialized offshore recovery vessel named the Linghangzhe (“Navigator”). Rather than landing on struts, the booster deployed four specialized hooks near its grid fins. These hooks engaged with a high-tech, flexible net capture system strung across the deck of the vessel, which utilized hydraulic damping to safely absorb the rocket’s remaining kinetic energy.
CASC claimed the operation to be the world’s first successful net-system recovery of a carrier rocket. By eliminating the necessity for heavy landing legs, the design slashes dead weight from the vehicle, allowing more mass to be allocated directly to payload capacity.
The state contractor has wasted no time outlining its next objectives. CASC announced that the development team intends to refurbish and refly the exact first-stage booster recovered from Friday’s mission before the end of 2026.
“Going forward, the Long March 10B carrier rocket development team will continue to optimize rocket performance and accelerate the iterative upgrade of reusable rocket technology.”
— China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC)
Measuring 63 meters long with a liftoff mass of 760,000 kilograms, the two-stage Long March 10B is capable of lifting 16,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO) in its reusable configuration. CASC noted that the rocket will serve as a low-cost workhorse for deploying commercial hardware and large satellite internet constellations.
Propelling China’s Crewed Lunar Ambitions
Beyond the immediate economic benefit to commercial satellite deployment, the successful recovery marks an aggressive leap forward for China’s human spaceflight and crewed lunar programs.
Friday’s flight served as a full-profile validation mission for the first stage of the upcoming Long March 10A; a closely related configuration designed to carry the Mengzhou crew spacecraft to orbit. Mengzhou is a larger, partially reusable successor to the legacy Shenzhou capsule.
The ultimate evolution of this rocket line, the triple-core Long March 10 heavy-lifter, will eventually be tasked with launching Chinese astronauts and a lunar landing stack to the moon. Beijing remains strictly committed to landing a pair of astronauts on the lunar surface before 2030.
Structurally, the Long March 10B’s first stage utilizes seven YF-100K kerosene-liquid oxygen (kerolox) engines, generating 890 tons of liftoff thrust. In a notable architectural hybrid, the 10B’s upper stage features a liquid methane and liquid oxygen (methalox) propulsion system, marking the suspected flight debut of CASC’s new YF-219 methalox engine.
The success of the 10B follows a successful in-flight abort test of the Mengzhou escape system in February, which utilized a single-stage demonstrator that also performed a controlled propulsive splashdown. With the critical validation of the net-capture system now secure, the stage is set for the debut of the crew-rated Long March 10A.
While CASC did not declare a formal launch date, the previous unveiling of an official “Mengzhou-1” mission patch strongly hints at a full, uncrewed orbital flight test arriving later in 2026.
