The Landspace did a hop test and reached an altitude of 350 meters and flew for 60-seconds flight before landing area. The landing had an accuracy of about 2.4 meters. The test is part of the development of the stainless steel Zhuque-3 rocket first announced in November 2023. The company is aiming for the first flight of Zhuque-3 in 2025. The Zhuque-3 will be a Falcon 9 sized rocket in terms of payload. It will be a bit wider. They are copying the stainless steel of SpaceX’s larger Super Heavy Starship.
The two-stage Landspace Zhuque-3 will be 4.5 meters in diameter and have a total length of 76.6 meters. Mass at liftoff will be about 660 tons and be powered by nine Tianque-12B engines. Payload capacity to LEO will be 21,000 kilograms when expendable. It will carry up to 18,300 kg when the first stage is recovered downrange, or 12,500 kg when returning to the launch site.
There are at least eight space rocket startups in China working on copying SpaceX.
The Zhuque-3 VTVL-1 test follows similar hop tests conducted by fellow Beijing-based launch startup iSpace in November and December 2023. The Zhuque-3 VTVL-1 is powered by an engine model that will be used for orbital flight, as with iSpace’s tests. Chinese hop tests by Jiangsu-based Deep Blue Aerospace—reaching the kilometer-level in 2022—and Linkspace used smaller engines. Another private launch startup, Galactic Energy, and state-owned spinoff CAS Space, have both held VTVL tests using jet-powered prototypes for their Pallas-1 and Kinetica-2 kerosene-liquid oxygen launchers. First launches are planned for 2024 and 2025 respectively. Both will initially be expendable
Landspace at 0800 UTC today conducted a successful 60-second, 350m hop at Jiuquan. Landing position accuracy is about 2.4m, the landing speed is ~0.75m/shttps://t.co/lOwQ2RvIoB https://t.co/hBDluzE4t9 pic.twitter.com/stSZHW72X2
— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) January 19, 2024
CAS Space has conducted VTVL tests with a small demonstrator. This uses jet engines rather than rocket engines and is for testing the GNC etc for ultimate goal of recovering rocket first stages. Looks like a small version of their answer to New Shepherd… https://t.co/nQ6fi5i2nE pic.twitter.com/YIMGxGOuiA
— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) April 4, 2023
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Even 11 years after SpaceX, they are still the first to achieve this after SpaceX. It can only show us how much SpaceX is leading the game.
Hopefully and due the stakes, the USA government stops its vendetta against Elon Musk and his companies.
Ha, yeah right.
It took them a long time to steal enough technical details to copy SpaceX.
yup but from this point the development will speed up
i give it 5 more years to get the full bonanza
I hope they succeed. Let’s see if their success puts pressure on Europe and India as well.
The more companies offering reusable cheap access to space, the more rapid we’ll enter the age of abundant space resource mining.
Kudos.