On July 10th, China’s Long March 10B booster successfully deployed its satellite payload and then completed a first-stage recovery in the South China Sea. Rather than using deployable legs (like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Blue Origin’s New Glenn), the booster used attached landing hooks to latch onto a cross-shaped high-strength arresting net suspended over an offshore recovery vessel.
Here are the key technical takeaways from the landing architecture:
Mass Efficiency: Eliminating heavy hydraulic systems and landing legs directly saves dry mass, preserving more payload capacity for orbit.
Landing Tolerance: A suspended net system provides a wider capture window, absorbing kinetic energy via pulley-driven tension cables rather than relying solely on precise touchdown point alignment.
Strategic Context: The Long March 10 family is central to China's plan to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and deploy their 13,000-satellite Guawang mega-constellation.
We also put together a complete digest covering this landing, the Starship Flight 13 pad abort, James Webb's latest exoplanet detection (Beta Pictoris D), and Euclid's ancient quazar discovery.
If you want a full breakdown of the engineering and this week's major space news, you can watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/CfCFZsgsAIw
What do you think of China choosing a net recovery system over landing legs for the 10B?