After many years trying to copy the Falcon 9, Elon Musk believes there is a company about to achieve it

It seems unlikely today that a startup can be 10 years ahead of the competition, but that is the case with SpaceX. Elon Musk’s aerospace company dominates the industry thanks to the Falcon 9, a rocket that has turned 15 years old and has been almost a decade landing vertically without any other orbital rocket having managed to repeat the feat. Until now.

The Falcon 9 has company. A few days ago, Elon Musk broke his usual disdain about the rest of the industry to point out a specific contender. The Chinese company Landspace is not only close to matching the Falcon 9, Musk admitted.but it could end up surpassing it.

The reason? Its new Zhuque-3 rocket, which combines the general architecture of the Falcon 9 with key elements of Starship, SpaceX’s most modern and experimental rocket. The gigantic Starship “is in another league,” Musk said. However, recognized that the Zhuque-3 could reach “Falcon 9 levels of reliability and launch rate” in about five years.

This is the Zhuque-3 rocket. The big bet of LandSpace, one of the private companies most powerful in the Chinese aerospace industryis a two-stage launcher with a first stage capable of landing vertically for reuse.

Although it has a very similar power to that of the Falcon 9 (with a payload capacity in its reusable configuration of 18.3 tons), it is built in stainless steel instead of aluminum, and burns methane and liquid oxygen instead of kerosene, the same material and the same fuel as Starship.

Landspace is just the first. If Zhuque-3 manages to successfully take off and land in the coming weeks, Landspace will be the first company to close the enormous distance that separates the industry from SpaceX (with permission from Blue Origin’s New Glenn, a larger and heavier rocket, which also hopes to take off and land successfully in November).

These two will be followed by other models such as the CZ-12A from the Chinese state company CASC and the Tianlong-3 from the Chinese startup Space Pioneer. Next will come the Hyperbola 3 from iSpace, the Pallas 1 from Galactic Energy and the Gravity 2 from OrienSpace. All Chinese companies, driven by the liberalization of the space industry promoted by Beijing in 2014.

Copy what works, then improve. Public incentives, such as very low-interest loans, only tell part of the story. If Chinese companies are on the verge of having their Falcon 9, it is because of their philosophy of first copying what works and then iterating until they improve on their Western rivals.

Elon Musk’s recognition is, perhaps, the clearest sign that the race has changed. It’s no longer a question of whether someone will copy the Falcon 9, but rather who will be the first to surpass it using, ironically, SpaceX’s own ideas for its next generation of rockets.

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