China Will Attempt to Land the Long March 10B Again

Video from the channel RUMO A MARTE about Long March 10B, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 10:21. Language: Portuguese. Video type: News.

The video, published days before the maiden flight, discusses the first attempt to recover the first stage of a Long March 10B at sea. According to recent maritime notices, the launch was scheduled for the 10th of that month from the Wenchang commercial launch site, with the recovery platform moving to the landing zone.

In April the rocket left its integration building for commercial pad 2 for a full wet dress rehearsal in which both stages were fully loaded. Hazard notices were issued for late that month, with a zone roughly 550 km away pointing to the recovery site, but they were cancelled and the rocket returned to its facilities. The author attributes the delay to problems with the platform, not the rocket. The Long March 10B is about 70 m tall and 5 m in diameter and has two stages: seven kerosene/liquid-oxygen engines on the first and a single methane/liquid-oxygen engine on the second. It can carry about 16 tonnes to low Earth orbit in reusable mode. It has no legs: during descent, with three engines firing, it deploys four hooks that latch onto the cables of a tower on the sea platform, whose sensors locate the stage. A crane arm would then secure it.

This would be CALT's first attempt to recover a stage, and China's third overall, after LandSpace with its Zhuque-3 and the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. The video considers success likely because the first stage is common to the whole Long March 10 family and was already tested on a 10A prototype earlier in the year. It also announces a second Zhuque-3 ready to fly shortly afterwards, and numerous Chinese companies preparing recoveries in 2026.