LandSpace landed a rocket booster this morning. It was made of stainless steel, and no steel booster had ever been recovered after an orbital launch until today, August 19th. The company had flown this rocket exactly once before, in December, when it exploded on the way down. SpaceX's own steel booster, Super Heavy, is still waiting on FAA approval to fly an orbital profile. Zhuque-3 lifted off from Jiuquan at 7.35am Beijing time, 66 metres of methane-fuelled rocket on nine engines. The stages parted at 137 seconds. The upper stage delivered the Honghu-3 internet satellite. The booster turned around, rode its grid fins down to a pad in Minqin County, 390 kilometres downrange, and dropped its legs in the last seconds before it settled. 260 days from crash to landing!! The first time SpaceX did this it took 345 days, from the failed droneship attempt in January 2015 to the landing that December. LandSpace was 85 days quicker, and the reason is not that Chinese engineers are cleverer. It is that the answer was already published. Copying is faster than inventing. What LandSpace copied is the visible logic of Falcon 9, engine count, grid fins, powered descent, legs. What it borrowed from Starship was the steel. No public evidence connects any of it to stolen SpaceX code, and Chinese engineers built and qualified the vehicle themselves. 40 days before this, a state-built Long March 10B was caught in a net on a ship at sea. Two recovery architectures, one state and one private, demonstrated inside six weeks. Nobody chose between them. Both were funded. The gap is still quite enormous, and pretending otherwise would be silly. China has recovered two orbital boosters and reflown none. Elon’s SpaceX passed 600 successful landings in April 2026, flies Falcon 9 roughly 150 times a year, and has sent the same booster up 36 times. LandSpace is the fourth entity in history to bring an orbital-class stage home, after SpaceX, Blue Origin and the Chinese state. Fourth is not first. The steel record is a narrow category too. Falcon 9 is aluminium lithium, so it was never in the running. Super Heavy is steel and has been caught by the tower more than once, but on flights that carried no orbital insertion. Musk said in October that the Zhuque-3 design could beat Falcon 9, then added that matching its cadence would take over five years. Landing a booster saves hardware. Only flying it again changes the economics, and that has not happened yet. LandSpace gave no reuse timeline in its statement today. Its deputy chief designer said earlier that a recovered stage would fly on the fourth mission, and the company had been aiming for reuse before the end of this year. Then there is the money. LandSpace has a STAR Market listing pending, so a booster standing upright in Gansu is now part of a prospectus. Two months ago SpaceX raised about 86 billion dollars in New York on the argument that reusable launch is a business nobody else can run. Somebody else just ran a piece of it, on their second attempt, in steel. Yes! The next number that matters is not a landing. It is how many times one of these flies.

Happy Birthday, Elon Musk! 🎂🚀 Today we celebrate the ultimate builder, innovator, and meme lord who turned sci-fi dreams into reality. From early startups to revolutionizing multiple industries, here’s a tribute to every major Elon Musk product Every Elon Musk product: 1. Blastar (1984) 2. Zip2 (1995) 3. X . com (1999) 4. Tesla Roadster (2006) 5. Falcon 1 (2006) 6. Tesla Model S (2009) 7. Falcon 9 (2010) 8. Giga Fremont (2010) 9. Dragon 1 (2010) 10. Supercharging network (2012) 11. Starship (2012) 12. Hyperloop (2013) 13. Dragon 2 (2014) 14. Tesla Model X (2015) 15. New Spacesuits (2015) 16. Starlink (2015) 17. Powerwall 1 (2015) 18. Giga Nevada (2016) 19. Tesla Model 3 (2016) 20. Powerwall 2 (2016) 21. Tesla solar roof (2016) 22. FSD (2016) 23. Tesla Semi (2017) 24. Tesla Roadster 2.0 (2017) 25. Tesla solar panels (2017) 26. Giga New York (2017) 27. Neuralink (2017) 28. Not-a-Flamethrower (2018) 29. Falcon Heavy (2018) 30. Giga Shanghai (2019) 31. Tesla Cybertruck (2019) 32. Tesla Cyberquad (2019) 33. Tesla Model Y (2019) 34. Tesla Megapack (2019) 35. Tesla Insurance (2019) 36. 4680 cells (2020) 37. Short Shorts (2020) 38. Tesla Optimus (2021) 39. Giga Berlin (2022) 40. Prufrock II (2022) 41. Burnt Hair Parfume (2022) 42. Giga Texas (2022) 43. Powerwall 3 (2023) 44. Tesla Dojo (2023) 45. Giga Mexico (2023) 46. Grok (2023) 47. Cybercab (2024) 48. Robovan (2024) 49. Robotaxi (2025) 50. SpaceX IPO (2026) 51. xAI + SpaceX Merger (2026) 52. Macrohard (2026) Note: this list is not exhaustive. Some of the products are in development status.