LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 lands, then tips over on the pad

The booster stood nearly at the center of its recovery pad in Minqin County, Gansu Province, after falling back from an orbital launch. Then a fire broke out near its base, one landing leg gave way and the 66-meter stainless-steel stage tipped over. LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 had nevertheless completed its second flight on Aug. 18 UTC, carrying the Honghu-03 satellite into orbit and achieving China’s first land recovery of an orbital-class first stage with landing legs.

The return was engineered for a landing roughly 390 kilometers downrange from Jiuquan. After the two stages separated 137 seconds into flight, the booster used its methane-and-liquid-oxygen engines, grid fins and autonomous control system to guide its descent, deploying four landing legs for a powered touchdown. The design is closer to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 approach than to China’s Long March 10B, whose first stage was recovered in July by a net-equipped vessel at sea.

LandSpace had a very specific failure to fix. On the Zhuque-3’s December 2025 debut, the second stage reached its planned orbit, but an anomaly during the final landing burn sent the first stage into the ground near the pad. For Y2, engineers reduced the number of engines used during the landing burn, added a predicted landing point to the onboard safety system and strengthened protection against reentry heat and structural loads.

The post-landing failure changes the immediate business story. NASASpaceflight said visual evidence showed residual methane and liquid oxygen igniting near the base, while LandSpace had not yet issued a detailed official account of the tip-over. The company had told Chinese financial outlet STAR Market Daily that it aimed to conduct a reflight test of the recovered stage within six months; that target is now less likely for the damaged booster. Recovery has been demonstrated. Reuse has not.

And so, concretely? LandSpace now has a flight-tested route for bringing a medium-lift booster back to land, a capability that could support more frequent launches for China’s Guowang and Thousand Sails satellite constellations if inspection and refurbishment become repeatable. The next evidence will be less cinematic: how much hardware needs repair, how quickly the stage can return to the pad and whether it can fly again. The landing clears the first threshold; the economics begin with the second flight.