On August 19th, the Blue Arrow Space Project‘s Vermillion Bird 3 Remote 2 Carrier Rocket was launched into the air and successfully completed land recovery. This mission was the first time China successfully implemented land-controlled recovery using the reusable landing leg of the Carrier Rocket, marking a major breakthrough in China‘s reusable rocket technology, following the successful recovery of the one-child maritime network of the Long March 10 B Carrier Rocket on July 10th.
On the same day, some netizens on U.S. social media platform X were talking about this matter, bringing up a “prediction” made by SpaceX CEO Musk in 2011 about the development of rocket technology in various countries—that year, Musk wrote in a post, “SpaceX has almost cornered Boeing, Lockheed, Europe (Arian rocket) and Russia (Proton/Union rocket) in rocket technology. The final battle of this competition is only up to China.”
The netizen marveled that Musk‘s prediction was “completely accurate.” Musk then forwarded the post and replied: “China is also currently the strongest competitor in artificial intelligence.”
When reporting on China‘s land-based rocket recycling, many foreign media mentioned China‘s rapid development in commercial space. Reuters reported that rocket recycling is critical to reducing costs and can make space exploration a commercially viable business similar to civil aviation. Blue Arrow has thus become the third private company in the world to successfully recycle orbital-grade thrusters after SpaceX and Blue Origin, further narrowing China‘s technological gap with the United States in this field.
The U.S. space news website space.com reviewed China‘s first global reticulation of a carrier rocket system in July this year, saying, “At that time, the Long March 10 B carrier rocket gently fell into the reticulated device fixed to ships at sea during recycling,” while this time, the Vermillion Bird 3 directly landed on land and maintained an upright posture by relying on land legs.
The website also pointed out that, in addition to Blue Arrow Aerospace, several Chinese private commercial aerospace companies are currently developing reusable one-child level recycling technology for carrier rockets. Given China‘s commercial aerospace development situation, “in the future, recycling of rocket landings in China may no longer be anything new.”