China’s test of the reusable Zhuque-3 rocket marks a critical step in a new space race where rapid launch cadence, satellite dominance, and military leverage—not symbolism—define power in orbit.

The launch was a partial success. The second stage successfully reached orbit, while the first stage struck the landing pad hundreds of miles downrange, destroying it. Despite an obvious anomaly preventing a successful landing, industry analysts concluded the attempted landing came spectacularly close for a first attempt.

It took Falcon 9 several attempts before successfully landing its first-stage booster, and more recently, US-based aerospace company Blue Origin 2 attempts to successfully land New Glenn’s first stage.

Blue Origin is only the second company to do so after US-based SpaceX, which — for years now — has routinely launched payloads to orbit with its Falcon 9 launch vehicle while recovering and reusing Falcon’s first-stage boosters.

The Reusable Rocket Revolution

SpaceX has refined this process of launching and recovering first-stage boosters to the extent of launching, landing, recovering, and turning around boosters for their next launch within 30 days.

The rapid reusability of SpaceX’ Falcon 9 has already revolutionized access to Earth orbit, drastically reducing costs while vastly expanding the number of launches possible per year. Blue Origin, should it successfully repeat New Glenn’s recent success while scaling up production and its launch cadence, would expand US access to orbit even further.

Rapid reusability allows for the deployment of vast constellations of satellites over vastly shorter periods of time. SpaceX’ Starlink constellation, a low earth orbit network of 8,000 communication satellites, improves global coverage and significantly reduces signal latency over older, less numerous existing satellite communication networks located in higher, geostationary orbits.

Such constellations lend significant advantages to the nations that deploy and have access to them.

As demonstrated in Ukraine, networks like SpaceX’s Starlink don’t just improve civilian satellite communication but also enhance military communication as well as provide links to long-range drones (especially naval drones) that line-of-sight radio signals cannot match.

SpaceX has provided a significant advantage to the US commercially and militarily — an advantage the US seeks to fully exploit and do so far beyond Starlink.

For example, the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has enlisted SpaceX and its Starlink platform to develop what is calls, “Starshield,” essentially a military version of Starlink, merging its communication capabilities together with target tracking, optical and signal surveillance, as well as early missile warning capabilities.

Between being publicly announced in 2022 to present day, nearly 200 Starshield satellites have been placed into orbit — an achievement that would have been impossible without SpaceX and its fleet of reusable launch systems — and an achievement other nations like Russia and China cannot currently match.

Russia, China Playing Catch Up 

While nations like Russia and China have their own constellations of civilian and military satellites, neither have........

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