China achieves successful land recovery of a rocket

In a landmark moment for China's space sector, a huge rocket booster gently touched down on China's northwestern desert terrain on Wednesday morning, marking the country's first-ever successful land recovery of a rocket.

Footage from surveillance drones flying near the landing trajectory shows that during the final phase of its return to Earth, at an altitude of roughly three kilometers above the ground, the booster ignited an engine at the center of its base for propulsive deceleration.

Shortly before touchdown, its four landing legs deployed. At the instant of touchdown, the engine shut down, and the legs held the over 40-meter-tall first stage firmly upright on the concrete landing pad in Minqin county, Gansu province.

The recovery has made LandSpace the second in China to bring a booster back to Earth intact and the first to successfully land a rocket on Chinese soil. Last month, the State-owned space conglomerate China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp recorded the nation's first successful rocket recovery, flying the first-stage booster of a Long March 10B back to a recovery ship in the South China Sea.

Wednesday's success also made China the second country in the world, following the United States, that can conduct both land- and sea-based recovery of rocket.

The 66.1-meter ZQ 3 Y2, a gigantic craft made primarily by stainless steel, blasted off at 7:35 am from its dedicated launch service tower at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, which is about 390 kilometers away from the landing site, in northwestern China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

The Y2 in the rocket's name signifies that the craft is the second to be built in the ZQ 3 series.

The rocket's second-stage booster separated from the first stage just over two minutes after the liftoff and continued flying upward before transporting a satellite called Honghu 03 into its preset orbit.

The ZQ 3 Y1 was launched in December 2025, becoming China's first reusable rocket to reach orbit. However, the recovery attempt failed as its first-stage booster burst into a fireball over the landing site in Minqin in the last seconds of descent.

Technical specs from LandSpace shows the ZQ 3 Y2 had a diameter of 4.5 meters and weighed about 570 metric tons when fully fueled.

The rocket was propelled by nine TQ 12A methane engines on the first stage and a TQ 15A methane engine on the second stage, boasting a liftoff thrust of nearly 770 tons that was enough to transport heavy satellites to low-Earth or Sun-synchronous orbits.