Today, China's Aerospace Science and Technology Corp joined SpaceX and Blue Origin as the only organizations to successfully land a booster stage back on Earth. Unlike SpaceX or Blue Origin, which have their boosters deploy landing legs and land on either a floating ship or land, Aerospace Science and Technology Corp had the booster land in a huge net, marking the first net-based recovery of a booster.

According to the video released by China, the Long March-10B does not have landing legs, which is why a net was used. This does make me question the ability and the speed at which China would be able to turn these boosters around and reuse them. Landing in a net means there are more points of contact on the booster, especially on the side, which could create failure points. To me, this seems to have been a test of sorts to get the booster back to a ship, and now they will work on adding legs to the rocket to make everything much more standardized.

While this is a huge accomplishment for anyone, the first stage still needs to be launched and recovered multiple times before it can be treated as a reliable reusable booster. The Long March- 10B also lags considerably when it comes to its payload capability, as it can only take 16 tons into orbit, while the Falcon 9 can take 25 tons and Starship is slated to take 100 tons plus. A huge step, yes, but still significant barriers stand in the way of catching up or even surpassing SpaceX.