China’s test of the reusable Zhuque-3 rocket marks a crucial step in a new space race where rapid launch cadence, satellite dominance and military influence, not symbolism, define orbital power.
In early December 2025, the Chinese private aerospace company LandSpace tested the launch of its Zhuque-3 rocket. This rocket is designed to place payloads into Earth orbit while recovering its first-stage booster, similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system and now Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket .
The launch was a partial success. The second stage reached orbit successfully, while the first stage struck the landing platform hundreds of kilometers away, destroying it. Despite an obvious anomaly that prevented a successful landing, industry analysts concluded that the landing attempt had been remarkably close to success for a first attempt.
It took several attempts for the Falcon 9 to successfully land its first-stage booster, and more recently, the American aerospace company Blue Origin made two attempts to successfully land the first stage of New Glenn.
Blue Origin is the second company to do this after the American company SpaceX, which for years has regularly launched payloads into orbit with its Falcon 9 launcher while recovering and reusing the Falcon’s first-stage boosters.
The reusable rocket revolution
SpaceX has perfected this first-stage booster launch and recovery process to the point where it can launch, land, recover, and reactivate the boosters for their next launch within 30 days.
China represents a much more ambitious country, possessing all the necessary ingredients not only to quickly catch up with the United States, but also to surpass them definitively.
The rapid reusability of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has already revolutionized access to Earth orbit, significantly reducing costs while dramatically increasing the number of possible launches per year. If Blue Origin can replicate the recent success of New Glenn while increasing its production and launch rate, it would further expand U.S. access to orbit.
Rapid reusability allows for the deployment of vast satellite constellations in much shorter periods. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, a low-Earth orbit network of more than 8,000 communication satellites, improves global coverage and significantly reduces signal latency compared to existing, older, and fewer satellite communication networks located in higher geostationary orbits.
Such constellations confer significant advantages to the countries that deploy and have access to them.
As demonstrated by Ukraine, networks such as SpaceX’s Starlink not only improve civilian satellite communications, but also military communications, and provide links with long-range drones (especially naval drones) that line-of-sight radio signals cannot match.
SpaceX has brought a significant commercial and military advantage to the United States, an advantage that the United States seeks to fully exploit and well beyond Starlink.
For example, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has enlisted SpaceX and its Starlink platform to develop what it calls “Starshield,” essentially a military version of Starlink, which combines its communication capabilities with target tracking, optical and signal surveillance, and early warning capabilities in the event of missile launches.
Between its public announcement in 2022 and today, nearly 200 Starshield satellites have been put into orbit, a feat that would have been impossible without SpaceX and its fleet of reusable launch systems, and that other countries like Russia and China cannot currently match.
Russia and China are trying to catch up
While countries like Russia and China have their own civilian and military satellite constellations, none of them are as large as that of the United States, mainly due to the limitations imposed on the speed at which launches can be carried out to put them into orbit.
Throughout 2025, for example, the United States carried out (approximately) 170 launches, compared to 78 for China and 15 for Russia.
In previous years, China had actually surpassed the United States in terms of annual launches. However, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system, the balance has decisively shifted in favor of the United States.
Zhuque-3 test launches are expected to continue throughout 2026, with the company aiming to continue reaching orbit while finally achieving successful landing of the first-stage booster. From there, everything will depend on how quickly and reliably LandSpace can repeat this success, as well as how rapidly it can develop both rocket production and the supporting infrastructure to significantly increase its launch rate.
Just as SpaceX, a single aerospace company, radically expanded US access to orbit, LandSpace may be able to do the same for China.
However, just as the United States now has Blue Origin developing its own reusable launch system, China has several other private and state-owned companies aiming for the same goal.
The private company Space Pioneer, with its Tianlong-3 rocket, and the Shanghai Academy of Space Technology, which is part of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), with its Long March 12A rocket, both plan to launch and possibly attempt to recover the first-stage boosters between the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026.
These two rockets represent systems of similar size and with potential capabilities roughly equivalent to those of SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
Russia, for its part, had announced that its Amur (or Soyuz-7) launch system was a candidate for reusable launches, but significantly delayed its development in order to prioritize the production and launch of existing rockets, including newer launch systems that are much further along in their development. This notably includes the continuation of Soyuz crewed and uncrewed flights, Proton launches, the planned initial launch of Soyuz-5, which is intended to replace the older Proton system, and the continued launches of Russia’s relatively new Angara family of rockets.
It is therefore unlikely that Russia will develop its own reusable launch capability in the near future. However, as a close partner of China, it should benefit in various ways from any successes China might achieve in the near future.
Goal-oriented capabilities exploited by primacy-oriented interests
SpaceX and Blue Origin openly state that their primary goal is to extend humanity beyond Earth. SpaceX has focused on colonizing Mars, while Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos made proposals for the creation of massive orbital habitats (similar to those proposed by physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970s) in his 2019 speech entitled “For the Benefit of Earth”.
Both companies are also involved in NASA’s attempt to send humans back to the Moon.
However, whatever the truth behind these ambitious goals, these two American companies operate within a profit-driven system committed to the pursuit of global supremacy, increasingly using the capabilities they have developed not “for the good of the Earth,” but to dominate it.
The BE-4 rocket engines developed by Blue Origin have already been used in joint Lockheed-Boeing United Launch Alliance (ULA) missions for the US NRO.
In addition to its collaboration with the NRO on the creation of Starshield, SpaceX has for years conducted regular launches for the U.S. Space Force and, prior to that, for the U.S. Air Force. These capabilities have allowed the United States to pursue its global military expansion and aggression against partners and allies of Russia and China, while simultaneously threatening those two countries themselves.
SpaceX is an anomaly in the American aerospace industry, an industry that, for decades, has been driven by the pursuit of profit above all other considerations, including innovation.
Before SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket became operational, most U.S. national security payloads were launched using United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. Both rockets were entirely expendable. Their design represented an upgrade of rockets and systems dating back to the 1960s. Because ULA (and before that, Boeing and Lockheed, which merged to form ULA) held a monopoly on orbital launches and existed solely to maximize profits, there was no need for innovation. Any excess revenue reinvested in research and development would only have undermined shareholder primacy.
SpaceX, a private company founded by Elon Musk, disrupted the comfortable monopoly enjoyed by Boeing and Lockheed by prioritizing rapid innovation over shareholder profits. Not only has SpaceX succeeded in groundbreaking innovation, but it is also profitable and outperforming Boeing and Lockheed’s ULA.
Initially, lobbyists representing established aerospace companies tried to block SpaceX’s entry into government launches. Today, American political think tanks funded by companies like Boeing and Lockheed present SpaceX as an example of innovation made possible by the American system. In reality, SpaceX has succeeded despite this system.
These same policymakers are now seeking to exploit the capabilities developed by SpaceX, a purpose-driven company, to bolster the continued pursuit of American primacy, motivated by profit and power.
Russia and China, on the other hand, have state-owned enterprises that are fully focused on specific objectives and engaged in all aspects of the country’s development, from energy production to military industrial production and research and development in the aerospace field.
Russia’s limitations are reflected in its smaller population and economy, as well as the constraints imposed by the US policy of containment and confrontation, particularly in the context of the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine. While it is unlikely that Russia can match or surpass the capabilities offered by SpaceX today, it previously outperformed the United States in terms of launch capabilities, transporting American astronauts to and from the International Space Station for years due to the inability of US aerospace monopolies to develop a timely replacement for the space shuttle.
China, on the other hand, has a larger economy, a much broader industrial base, more modern and extensive infrastructure, and produces millions more STEM graduates each year than the United States. Thanks to goal-oriented state-owned enterprises and a national policy that encourages private companies to pursue specific objectives, China has already surpassed the United States in a number of areas and will almost certainly surpass American space launch capabilities, both in terms of quality and quantity, unless the United States takes extreme preemptive measures.
A new space race – new rules
Elon Musk of SpaceX said of the Zhuque-3 test launch that even if it was successful, by the time it is produced and used on a large scale, SpaceX’s next-generation launch system, Starship, will have already surpassed it.
However, linear comparisons with China’s development have proven tragically wrong.
Just because it took China years to catch up with the United States in terms of space launch capabilities before SpaceX pushed the US back into the lead, and it took China several more years to begin developing and testing its own reusable rockets, does not mean it will take the same amount of time to match SpaceX’s Starship, or that China will not be able to completely surpass the United States’ space launch capabilities.
China is already developing the super-heavy launch systems Long March 9 and 10, intended to fulfill the same functions as SpaceX’s Starship, and engine production and testing are already underway.
While the United States has only one or two specialized space launch companies (Blue Origin), China represents a much larger country, with all the necessary ingredients not only to quickly catch up with the United States, but also to surpass them permanently.
In a global military, economic, and industrial competition, the United States is losing to China in virtually every area, and it is unlikely that it will retain its advantage over China in terms of space launch capabilities, especially since these capabilities were developed in spite of , and not because of, the main characteristics of the United States’ socio-economic and political system.
If China fails to catch up with the United States for various reasons, including the United States’ persistent ambitions to encircle and contain China through chaos, conflict, and even proxy wars, as they have done with Russia, the United States, which has long demonstrated its willingness to fully exploit them economically and even militarily, will gain a considerable and dangerous advantage.
The unbalanced access to space offered by reusable launch systems means not only the ability to put larger and more powerful satellite constellations into orbit, but also the ability to target and remove other countries’ constellations from orbit.
This includes the use of coorbital satellites (sometimes called “killer satellites” or “inspector satellites”) capable of approaching other countries’ satellites. Countries like the United States, with their high launch rates, can quickly put new, more advanced coorbital satellites into orbit or replace losses caused by an adversary’s coorbital or anti-satellite capabilities.
This represents an imbalance of forces in orbit, creating a potential imbalance of forces on Earth.
Only time will tell if China’s ability to compete with the United States in all areas on Earth can extend to this new space race taking place above it.
