Congratulations LandSpace
Even as this stuff becomes more standard, it's still difficult to get right but competition is good for all of us.
China marches towards re-usable rockets with successful first-stage landing
Chinese space startup LandSpace has landed a first-stage booster on land, the first time a Middle Kingdom company has achieved the feat. LandSpace flies rockets called Zhuque and has built three generations of the craft. Zhuque-1 only flew once, in 2018. Zhuque-2 became the first liquid oxygen-methane vehicle to reach orbit when …
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Thursday 20th August 2026 12:32 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Congratulations LandSpace
Indeed, but even though the Chinese market is protected, capital is in short supply when compared with the US. This imposes the financial discipline that drives the current hypercompetitive market: whatever you make has to be cheap, and failures are expensive. I don't think sufficient attention is paid to how good this makes the companies that survive, we just tend to think of them as benefitting from subsidies, whereas most of them don't beyond the usual kind of tax breaks given elsewhere in the world.
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Thursday 20th August 2026 15:53 GMT retiredFool
Re: Congratulations LandSpace
Yep, and Bessent buying 4B of long term bonds is laughable in an environment of 40T debt (0.01%), and 2T of new debt every year at the moment. A reckoning is coming. And it isn't just the fed's and AI co's issuing the debt. I buy some muni's, and there is a tsunami of local/state debt this year as well.
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Friday 21st August 2026 12:24 GMT VoiceOfTruth
Re: Congratulations LandSpace
That debt is about $115,000 per capita in the USA. Every baby at birth already has a debt of $115,000 which they will have to pay as they become adults.
The USA will have to live within its means. But it shows no sign of doing so. Instead it wants another credit card.
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Friday 21st August 2026 14:07 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Congratulations LandSpace
That number alone means little as long as there still people prepared to buy the debt. As we saw after the collapse of Bretton-Woods and the oil crisis: there are always people prepared to buy American debt (and by extension other assets). Well, there were. The rotation out of treasuries thus far is small (there aren't that many better alternatives), but the Chinese are the most notable in switching from treasuries to gold whenever the gold price drops. And it's also very slowly managing to grow its own bond market – not a good fit for international investors but if you trade a lot with China and perhaps want to avoid American controlled financial exchange systems…
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Friday 21st August 2026 14:28 GMT retiredFool
Re: Congratulations LandSpace
This should be our (US) greatest concern. China is becoming the producer to the world. So if I'm the UAE or any supplier of a commodity like oil or iron or ..., selling it to China, and then buying a China manufactured end product, why use dollars? You have to go from your currency to dollars to yuan and back. Seems simpler to just trade direct with China. China has slowly been implementing this. I don't see it happening overnight, just a chipping away at the dollar trade. And eventually especially with technology, it seems everyone could trade direct, be it china to australia or eu to uae. I think the US using economic sanctions routinely isn't helping either. You've got all those dollars and then wham, they get sanctioned and you can't use them. Gold on the other hand... Or platinum or palladium or any high value commodity is a different story.
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Thursday 20th August 2026 14:32 GMT Jellied Eel
Who's your daddy?
Just landing a first stage is, however, mightily impressive as only SpaceX and Blue Origin have previously achieved the feat.
So did-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
which both Musk and Bezos claimed were inspirations. But DC-X got caught up in the usual politics, defunded and then we had to wait for SpacX and BO to reinvent the wheel.
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Thursday 20th August 2026 18:57 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Who's your daddy?
>But I don't recall SpacX sticking the landing first time either.
And that was their principle advantage.
A failed NASA launch would mean a decade long stop in operations while there are congressional, presidential and HOA investigations all of which cost many times the total SpaceX development budget.
Hopefully the Chinese company is also allowed to fail and iterate without all launch operations being dictated by how many sons of provincial governors they have on their board
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Friday 21st August 2026 12:07 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Who's your daddy?
A failed NASA launch would mean a decade long stop in operations while there are congressional, presidential and HOA investigations all of which cost many times the total SpaceX development budget.
I get the sense that there was some factional politics involved, ie one camp wanted another reusable space plane to replace the Shuttle. And to a degree, I can't say I blame them, especially for manned rockets. Space planes at least have some control over where they land, especially with long, wide runways. VTOL just seems riskier with the final approach being a lot more final.
Hopefully the Chinese company is also allowed to fail and iterate without all launch operations being dictated by how many sons of provincial governors they have on their board
China has a lot of billionaires and private money investing in space, giving the Chinese supplier diversity. They also caught another booster recently using a barge with a cage & wires to catch it, which was quite neat & speculation that could reduce landing stresses with a more gradual deceleration. But it's neat watching Scott Manley's summaries. Rocket launches used to be rare, now there's multiple countries and companies launching and innovating. Not convinced there's a market for all of them, but competition is driving innovation.
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Thursday 20th August 2026 19:44 GMT DS999
Hey some of us are trying, but all the uninformed hordes who support the mentally declining pedophile grifter keep voting for more of his hollow promises.
By 2029 we'll either have put MAGA in the dustbin of history or I'll have permanently left, desiring to escape before MAGA has a civil war over whether to rename the ruins of America as Gilead or Trumpistan.
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Thursday 20th August 2026 19:58 GMT BasicReality
We've been working on it. We've seeing less democrats elected these days. The government is doing well at removing criminals who don't belong here, the border has been closed off pretty well, crossings are far below where they used to be. Gun rights and religious rights are being upheld. We have a ways to go yet, but I'm confident in the direction of the country. Get Vance or Rubio after Trump and we can keep the progress going.
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Friday 21st August 2026 08:57 GMT Charlie Clark
No mention of the national debt and the budget deficit, I see. And you're clearly not a farmer struggling with higher costs and declining demand. Or an industrialist struggling to replace expensive imports with – well nothing really because no-one in America makes what they need. Or a housebuilder who can't find skilled immigrant labour. Healthcare is getting more expensive and coverage is declining.
Still, you've got a broken reflecting pool, a partly demolished White House and the Kennedy Center under a tarpaulin so it's not all bad.
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Friday 21st August 2026 14:25 GMT BasicReality
Oh the debt is its own problem. You wouldn't like my solution though. I'm fully in favor of eliminating most government spending and paying off all the debt. Once that's done, lower taxes for everyone.
I'd put Social Security and Medicare/Medicade on a 20 year plan to shut down entirely. No, we can't cut off people who rely on it now, but wind it down over a period of time.
Government isn't your parent, you should never rely on it to live off of. Any type of welfare program, gone. I did have a friend recommend a compromise that was interesting. Keep the welfare programs available, but a hard lifetime limit on them. You can collect for a period of perhaps a year or two, any time for any reason, but after the lifetime limit reached, no more.
But overall, people need to be responsible for themselves, not depend on the government to take care of them.
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Friday 21st August 2026 09:22 GMT geoff61
Re: Waking you up at 3am
The first stage is supersonic when it re-enters the atmosphere. At some point one of the burns it makes on the way down takes it subsonic, but until that point its supersonic flight generates a shockwave that is heard on the ground as a sonic boom. In fact for Falcon 9 it is a triple boom - see https://www.spacelaunchschedule.com/news/sonic-boom-rocket-landing/.
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Friday 21st August 2026 14:11 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Waking you up at 3am
I assumed that the sonic transition would be high enough that you wouldn't hear it on the ground and that people would be kept far enough from the landing site, for safety, that any low altitude noise wouldn't be an issue
Then I remembered what agency was in charge of public safety.
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