For all of China’s breakthroughs in clean-tech and disruptive strength in AI, there is one area of frontier engineering where America is still way ahead: space. That may be about to change.
Last Friday’s successful landing of a reusable first-stage booster for the Long March 10B rocket represents a leap beyond anything China’s space industry has achieved. Such boosters provide the grunt work needed to get smaller second-stage and orbital vehicles into space, and were traditionally jettisoned with each launch.
Learning to recycle them allowed the Falcon 9 developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to reduce costs by almost 90%. With a fleet of only a few dozen first stages, Falcon 9 has given SpaceX a seemingly unassailable lead. Its nearly 10,000 satellites represent more than two-thirds of all active orbiters.
The Long March 10B, whose first stage landed on an offshore platform after launch in southern China, is the first viable competitor outside the US. Getting a reusable rocket back to base is a real engineering challenge.
Only one other company had achieved it until last week: the Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin, which completed just a single successful mission before its dramatic explosion on the launchpad in May.
Left to its own devices, a booster would hit the ocean with the force of a freight train crashing into a cliff. Landing it gently enough to avoid damage and putting it back into service within weeks is a miraculous achievement.
Nor is China’s 10B simply a carbon copy of the Falcon 9. Instead of using a reverse fuel burn to land on legs like the Falcon 9 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn, it used a system of wires to catch its first stage, like a butterfly in a net. That may reduce stresses on the rocket’s structure and eliminate the weight of landing gear, leaving more space for cargo.
Whether the alternative system is a success or not, it is a sign that China’s rocket scientists are coming up with innovative approaches of their own. That intellectual ambition should be as concerning for SpaceX’s pretensions to unquestioned leadership as the 10B landing itself.
Surveying China’s entire space industry, current conditions look remarkably similar to the state of the electric vehicle sector nearly a decade ago. Then, as now, Musk seemed to be in a race with himself, rather than foreign competitors. Back in 2017, Tesla’s breakthrough Model 3 was embroiled in “production hell” as it ramped up output. The episode pushed the company to the edge of bankruptcy, but ultimately allowed it to capture more than half the value in the global auto industry.
That victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat trajectory is the one SpaceX would like to see for Starship, its fully reusable planned launcher. It is slated for commercial operations later this year, but has suffered failures on every one of its 12 test flights. If Starship succeeds, it will be able to carry at least five times as much cargo as Falcon 9 and squeeze costs further—to the point where orbital trips might become almost routine.
As in 2017, there is a potent competitor waiting in the wings. A decade ago, few took China’s electric car industry seriously. Most vehicles sold were glorified golf carts with little chance of rivalling incumbent carmakers at home, let alone punching a hole in export markets.
BYD was already a clear leader, but the would-be entrepreneurs behind the likes of Nio, Li Auto, XPeng, Leapmotor and CATL seemed simply a confusing alphabet soup of also-rans with more hope than capability. Few would have guessed that the same names would have Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors trembling less than a decade later.
Right now, China’s nascent space industry looks a lot like that. Half-a-dozen private rocket companies are working on reusable launch vehicles, alongside groups affiliated with scientific institutes and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, the state-owned company that built the Long March.
It is anyone’s guess which, if any, will succeed —but the sheer volume of competition resembles nothing so much as the ferment of private, provincial and national funding that created the country’s current world-beating EV sector.
If Beijing’s industrial policy plays out the same way in space as it has on roads and in solar panels, a decade from now we may be talking not about SpaceX’s unimpeachable technological leadership, but about chronic involution in China’s reusable-rockets industry. In that scenario, ruinous competition among mainland players would push costs down to undreamt-of levels, raising fears of technological dominance around the globe.
Musk’s orbital spaceflight dominance has gone unquestioned, but he should watch out for China Inc catching up. Keep your eyes fixed on the stars, and you may miss what’s happening on Earth. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy.