China Has More Rocket Designs Than Anyone Else..... Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:04 Hello, it's Scott Manley here. Today I want to talk about rockets in China because China has a ridiculous number of rocket variations, right? I actually made a video talking about all of China's rockets back uh you know 6 years ago I guess and I got most of them. They were mostly long march variants. There was one that I missed but since then there has been a an explosion in the number.

00:28 I mean, okay, some have actually exploded on launch, but there has been many, many more variants of rockets. And this really comes down to a an event in 2014. There was like a state council directive that said, "Sure, we will let private companies build civil space infrastructure." Now, they weren't allowed to replace like the CAS, which was like the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

00:50 They were supposed to run the the space program. There was also a Kasich which is the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation and they mainly build missiles but anyway because of this decision suddenly there was a lot of investment capital a lot of Chinese uh investors who wanted to get in on China's SpaceX and so there was a lot of rockets built and a lot of rockets flown and so I want to go over every single one of these and explain what they are and what they have in common because there's a surprising

01:19 amount of commonality and so first up I actually want to open with a rocket which I barely mentioned in passing in my previous video, but it's actually a governmentbuilt rocket. It's called the Quaihou 1 and that actually first flew in 2013 and after a couple of launches that was upgraded to the 1A. So it means uh the name means speedy boat and it's from Cassich, right?

01:40 Which is the company or whatever the organization that makes missiles. And it turns out that if you take the first two stages of the Quaiou 1A and measure them, they're pretty much exactly the same size, mass, and performance as the first two stages of the Dongfang 25 missile. Now, some sources say that this actually matches the DF21, and that's true, but the second stage is a better match for the Dongfang uh 25.

02:06 Anyway, they add grid fins to the first stage to help with a steering on descent ascent. And then they add two extra stages on top of those two so they can get to orbit. And they basically spun up a commercial, an organization, a sales office to sell this to potential, you know, customers. This company that they set up was called Xpace. Yes, Xpace. So anyway, yeah, rocket is like 1.4 meters in diameter.

02:35 total height is about 20 m, 31 tons at liftoff, and it can put about 350 kg in orbit. And these numbers, they're going to be seen quite a lot in this video. Uh, first stage is about 8.7 m long, 55 tons of thrust. Second stage is 4.3 m long. Third stage is a little bit narrower, 1.2 uh m in diameter, 1.6 long. And the final stage is storeable liquid propellant monomethyl hydroine and nitrogen troxide so they can perform relatively accurate orbit insertion.

03:04 So the initial version could put 200 kg into orbit and that flew twice. It was replaced by the 1A which offered uh 300 kg to orbit and that launched 27 times with only three failures. And now they have the 1A Pro which has a larger upper stage and a larger fairing and that raises their mass to or to orbit to 450 km but that's only launched three times.

03:30 Anyway, in parallel in 2020 they introduced the Quio 11 and that is a bigger beefier version. It's now got a 2.2 2 m diameter stage. And this was presumably based on the Dongfang 41 ICBM since again the first two stages from that missile match the first two stages of this rocket. It's still a four- stage launch vehicle, but it's now able to put or so it's now 78 tons, 25 m tall, and it can put one ton into orbit.

03:58 However, the first launch of the Quou 11 was a failure, and it would be 2 years before they flew again, this time successfully. In total, they've actually launched six times the Quuhou 11, and there are plans for a Quou 21 and 31, but those have yet to see the light of day or fly. I'm really good at overthinking situations. In today's world, with so much information out there, I can use data to drive my decisions.

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05:57 So, Galactic Energy, they make a rocket called the series 1 and this debuted in 2020 and it's actually launched more than any other private company in China. So, series 1 also is a 1.4 meter diameter solid uh fuel rocket. The first and second stages pretty much match the DF-25 or they're and the performance is close to the Quou. The third and fourth stages are different.

06:22 Still, it's about 20 m tall, 30 tons, and it puts 300 kg into orbit. So, they're basically a slightly different flavor of the same rocket. Now, there have been a few upgrades to this series 1. In 2023, they made their first launch from a ship, so they don't need a launch site on land anymore. The series 1 was also superseded by the 1A which added a more powerful third stage and then the 1B came along with a larger fairing.

06:49 Overall between the one, the 1A and the 1B, they've launched 23 times and had two failures. But Galactic Energy, they kept building. They also developed the series 2. And this is 3.35 m in diameter. This is fat. Uh, this is supposed to be able to put 1,300 kg to orbit and has a launch mass of about 100 tons. But its first launch in 2026 was a failure.

07:14 The first stage nozzle disintegrated and the rocket crashed. And we've never seen footage from this failure that I know of. But Galactic's third energy's third rocket is probably their most important that launched recently, the Palace One. So series and Palace, by the way, are asteroids. So they're basically stealing names from asteroids or goddesses depending upon what you want.

07:36 Uh yeah, it's a medium lift kerosene liquid oxygen so liquid fueled rocket. It is 42 m tall, twice the size of the other rockets. It's got a first stage powered by seven engines with a total thrust of 350 tons. And the upper stage has a single vacuum optimized engine. This is supposed to be able to place a five ton payload in orbit. and it recently made its first launch achieving a success on its first attempt.

08:02 So congratulations there. Ultimately however this is supposed to develop booster recovery and reuse compat capability. And then there'll be this the panalis 1B which is sort of like their lightweight version of the Falcon Heavy where they take three of those first stage boosters and strap them together giving it a payload of something like 17 tons. Anyway, now let's take a look at another company with uh some suspicious similarities to these missiles.

08:30 Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Limited. What a name, huh? It's also known as iSpace, which is no relation to Japan's iSpace. And the way you tell them apart is that China's iSpace has a hyphen between the eye and the space. So, they're more they're not space, they're eye space. Does that clear it up? Anyway, their rocket is a hyperola one.

08:51 And again, it shares the first stage probably with the DF-21. It's also a four- stage rocket with three solid stages and one liquid. The main difference with the Quuhou 1 and the series 1 is the second and the third stages are different. They're actually longer and skinnier. Like Quaiou, they also use grid fins for steering the first stages, but the whole stack is like 21 m tall, 31 tons, and it gets 250 kg to orbit.

09:17 For all that, they get pretty much the same capability. Its first launch in July 2019 was a success and that was actually the first successful orbital launch by a private Chinese company or a non-government Chinese company depending on how you want to word these things. But after that one successful launch they thought great let's upgrade this. They they expanded the second, the third, the fourth stages.

09:42 Now it was almost 2 m taller and another 10 tons with an increase in payload capacity. Unfortunately, the next three launches of this upgraded rocket were all failures and they wouldn't have a successful flight until April 2023. And that was with no payload at that point cuz nobody trusted putting their satellites on this rocket that had failed multiple times.

10:06 Since then, there have been three more launches with actual payloads, one of which was a failure. The plan was then to develop Hyperola 2, a liquid fueled booster using methane and liquid oxygen. They made some vertical hops with this first stage booster and uh they cancelled that then in 2023 and they moved their efforts to the even larger Hyperola 3 which again is a bit like a Chinese Falcon 9 with plans to land its boosters on barges for recovery and we have no idea when we might actually see that fly.

10:38 So now the next one up is land space and they two started out with an all solid launch vehicle derived from a missile. This was the one and again it has three solid stages. Yes, they decided not to have a fourth stage this time. I guess that made getting into the the final orbit a bit of a navigation challenge. However, they never got that far be because in 2018 they became the first Chinese company to attempt an orbital launch, but they had attitude control issues with the third stage and the payload never h reached

11:09 orbit. And after that, Lansspace decided that they had had enough of messing around with these silly repurposed motors from missiles and they began developing their own rocket, the Zuch 2. So the Zuch 2 was the first rocket to reach orbit fueled by methane, right, in the world, not just in China. Uh the two stages standing about 50 m tall, they massed about 200 tons with a payload capacity of four tons, right?

11:35 The first stage was propelled by four uh TQ12 engines which are the first engines developed by a Chinese group outside the government. The second stage uses a single vacuum optimized uh TQ12 engine. So the first launch attempt of this was in December 22 and the first stage operated successfully but the second stage failed. Success however would come on the second flight in July of 2023.

12:03 So there'd be more flights of the base design and then there would be an upgrade to the 2E version where and then the 2E block 2 which debuted in May of 2026. So this these upgrades raise the launch mass to like 270 tons and the payload to orbit is now up to 6 tons which is like a 50% improvement. Now overall versions of the Guch 2 that is eight launches with two failures.

12:26 And of course, the next step for landspace was the Zuche 3, which is a lot like taking a Falcon 9, building it from stainless steel and converting it to run on methane. And they've flown this twice with both launches reaching orbit. And one of them successfully landing on a p had downrange on landing legs, although a fire later caused the booster to fall over, meaning that they uh yeah, they have yet to actually prove reuse.

12:55 Regardless, congratulations. Okay, so now the next company is Space Pioneer and they make the Tan Long series of rockets. And unlike all the others, they didn't build their first rocket by buying solid boosters from the government. Instead, they bought YF-100 rocket engines from the government and built rockets using that. Now, initially they pitched the Tanlong 1, but that never flew.

13:17 Tanl long 2 did complete development and it launched successfully in April 2023 and this was the first successful launch of a liquidfueled rocket developed by non-government organization in China. The Tan Long 2 is about 33 m long tall 150 tons, three stages. The first is propelled by three YF100 engines. The second uses a smaller TH11V and there's a third stage that uses hypergolics for you storeable propellant for onorbit operations.

13:44 And I don't know why I told you that because the Tan Long 2 only ever flew once because they were all hot on the Tan Long 3, which was desperate to launch. So desperate to launch that it famously flew before it was ready with the booster lifting off during what was supposed to be a static fire. Yes, thankfully nobody was hurt in this mishap. The rocket again resembles a Falcon 9 using kerosene and liquid oxygen as fuel with nine engines on the first stage and a single vacuum optimized engine on the second stage.

14:16 It's about 71 m tall, 600 tons at launch and a planned mass to orbit of about 14 tons. And it comes with grid fins and legs for recovery. Unfortunately, the one time the whole stack was launched in April 2026, the first stage experienced an anomaly, so it's yet to deliver on any of its promised capabilities. Okay, so now I want to go back to looking at solid motors and specifically a bunch of fat ass uh launch vehicles, right?

14:43 We have Kinetic, Gilong 3, and Gravity 1 and they all have similar first stage booster casings that are 2.65 m in diameter. Solid rockets about 210 tons of thrust. So, Gilong 3 or smart dragon that comes from China rocket which is actually a subsidiary of China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology meaning that it's actually descended from the first rocket group uh in China.

15:08 Uh, CAT was established in 1957 by a guy called Jean Susin who uh helped found JPL in the US and he'd generally been doing great things in US aerospace until the Red Scare and McCarthyism got him stripped of his security clearances and eventually deported to China where they were more than happy for to give him lots of money so that he could actually do things like develop China's rockets and their nuclear program.

15:34 Yes, one of the biggest failures in US history. Anyway, China rocket is a spin-off from this group. And this group also, by the way, builds some of the larger liquidfueled long march rockets. But yeah, they also developed this small rocket called the Gilong one or Smart Dragon 1. And it has one very unusual design feature. Again, it's a four stage rocket with three stages from solid stages from existing missiles.

15:58 So, the motor casings are about 1.2 m in diameter. And it appears that the first stage is probably the same stage that was used on the zuche one. Uh so the payload to orbit is about 200 kg. But anyway, for some reason the final stage uh the payload and the stage engine stage are upside down which means the payload sits below the engine which means after deploying the first the final stage to orbit the whole thing has to flip around to complete orbital insertion.

16:28 And anyway, yeah, Gilong 1 only flew once in 2019 and achieved success uh before, but then of course more powerful versions have come along since then, including the Gilong 3, which has a 2.65 m diameter core, four stages, again, 31 m tall, total launch mass of about 145 tons, 1,600 kg to orbit. Now the whole thing is topped by a 3.35 m diameter fairing which makes it look like a Hitachi thing if you know what I mean.

17:00 Anyway, uh every launch of this rocket has been from a barge in the Yellow Sea and every single launch since 2022 has been a success. 12 launches 100% success rate. Congratulations on that. So anyway, yeah, the first stage of this is very likely the first sta same first stage that is used by the kinetic 1, also known as the Jonke one. And this is similar in size, mass, and performance to the stages uh but the stages are laid out differently.

17:26 Kinetic 1 is from Cass Space, which is majority owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. uh Kinetic 1 launches from Gichuan and uh it also debuted in 2022 with 15 total launches and only one failure. So having had their fun with solid motors, Cast Space decided then to uh start working on the Kinetica 2, which is a liquidfueled rocket using kerosene liquid oxygen.

17:53 It has a 3.5 m diameter booster core with three YIF-100 engines, but the standard configuration actually puts three cores in parallel. So they get nine engines on that first stage. Uh the whole thing masses about 600 tons. It stands 53 m high and it has a payload capacity of about 8 tons to sunsyn synchronous orbit. And of course they have long-term plans to actually start doing booster recovery in each of these.

18:18 But they also have a proposed heavy version of this which has four boosters around the core. So if you were excited by Falcon Heavy coming down with two boosters side by side, think about this one with four boosters coming down at once. That would be awesome. Yeah. Anyway, so the Kinetic 2 actually debuted successfully in March 2026 and its payload was the Chingho cargo ferry spacecraft which is ultimately supposed to replace the cargo uh ferry which is used for the Tan Tangong station.

18:49 So anyway coming back to the booster cores now we have gravity 1 and this is built by Orian space. It's also built around the same 2.65 65 meter core and uh it again same core as the Gong one and the Kinetica one but it's this rocket is actually a lot bigger because they actually cluster four more of those boosters around the core so that makes it a short fat powerful rocket in fact it's the most powerful all solid propulsion launch vehicle operating right now so it's only 30 m tall but it's a lot fatter tons with 4.2

19:22 2 ton capacity to sun-synchronous orbit. And it debuted in 2024 and has had three successful launches, all from a specialized launch barge. And it won't surprise you to hear that Orian Space is also developing the Gravity 2, a larger liquid fueled rocket with booster recovery capabilities, and the Gravity 3, which is supposed to be Starship size. Of course, it is.

19:44 We're not done with this by any means. Okay. Deep Blue Aerospace, they have the Nebula 1 and they skipped the solid fuel rocket rush and they went straight to demonstrating vertical takeoff and landing capabilities, similar to SpaceX's Grasshopper test bed. So, the Nebula 1 design looks like a subscale version of the Falcon 9 with nine Thunder Rage engines and a single Thunder RV upper stage engine.

20:09 It's only 30 m tall, 150 tons, and 2.8 tons of payload to low Earth orbit. And the initial launch date does keep getting pushed back. They also apparently sold a bunch of tickets for suborbital tourism starting in 2027. I'm sure that's going to happen. Space Epoch. Well, they made news last year when they soft landed their uh XYZ rockets at sea. This was the first demo of a much larger stainless steel methane liquid oxygen type rocket.

20:39 But nothing has flown beyond this small test. Linkspace, well, they may have probably gone out of business. They had been performing vertical takeoff and landing tests with a rocket for a while, but they've gone quiet and their website is dead. And then of course there while there's all this private investment with its own ideas about how spaceflight should be turned into a business, there's a number of new liquidfueled long march rockets and these are mostly using cryogenic propellants unlike the old hypergolic

21:09 propellants in the first you know long march 1 through 4. Uh they also have the occasional solid booster and stuff like that. So yeah, there's no more new designs for big boosters with hypergolic propellants on China's horizon. So my previous video included the long march 6 and 7 and 11, but since then, well, we've now had the long march 8, 10, 12, 9 maybe.

21:35 Yeah, the long march 8 is actually a downgrade from the long mar 7. Uh it long mar 7 has four boosters around the core. And while the long march 8 uh you can actually use either two or you could have a completely bare co core. Uh the second stage of the 8 is the third stage of the 7A which is a high performance hydrolocks engine you know for high altitude orbits.

21:57 Uh but there's also the 8A which widens the second stage to match that of the booster and makes it slightly bigger. So yeah uh 8 is sort of less than the seven for some reason. Long March 9 that is supposed to be a massive super heavy lift vehicle comparable to Starship but is definitely still confined to the drawing board. The Long March 10, well that's a lot like the Falcon Heavy again with three boosters glued together to create a monster 2200 ton launch vehicle.

22:23 Each of the boosters is about 600 tons and propelled by seven YF-100 engines burning kerosene. The second stage is about 200 tons and only has two of these engines. And then there's a third stage and that's about 60 tons, but that's a high performance hydrolock stage. This is what's going to be used to launch China's astronauts on their moon mission at the end of the decade, if not sooner.

22:49 So now in parallel to the three core 10, we have the 10A and the 10B. And those have both actually launched. And you wonder why these vers variants launched early. Well, because these are both single stick versions. They don't have the three boosters in parallel. So the 10A uh this basically ditches the third stage of the 10 and it has a smaller second stage and they only have one engine on the second stage.

23:12 So that makes it again comparable to the Falcon 9. And um yeah, it's supposed to also have recovery hardware on board landing legs and grid fins, but that wasn't on its one launch. One singular launch was a suborbital max Q abort test for the Mangan capsule which of course will be used by Chinese astronauts when they're going to the moon. The 10B that did actually demonstrate booster recovery in July of 2026 that used the whole wire and hook capture system.

23:42 But the 10B is a lot different from the 10. Again, it's only a single stage like stick first stage booster. Uh but the second stage is now methylox. it switched over. I think it's like a different organization that's building these. Uh so the launch of the 10B, yeah, it was successful. They recovered it. They put their satellite into orbit. But as soon as that was successful, they also announced the 10C, which is based on the 10B, but with more engines and larger stages, making it even less like the original 10.

24:12 Anyway, uh in the previous video, I did talk about the Long March 11. Uh, this is another all solid system derived from the DF-31 and it's launched like 18 times since 2015 with 100% success rate. So, it's not exactly prolific, but still it's reliable. Finally, we have the Long March 12. And this is another two-stage medium lift kerosene oxygen launcher.

24:34 And it's only ever launched one type of payload, the Gulwang internet satellites. It's had seven launches in total, three this year. Now, there is the 12A variant, and it's practically a different rocket altogether, switching to methane for both stages, and it adds landing legs and grid fins for booster recovery. There's been one launch attempt of the 12A on December 2025, and uh it successfully reached orbit with its mass simulator payload, but the booster recovery went wrong.

25:04 In fact, it appears to have crashed about a mile away from the landing site. The Long March 12B is actually built by a completely different organization. Now, it's supposed to be a commercial variant of the Long March 12. It's a bit larger. It's got nine engines on the first stage, 50% more thrust, and claims that it can put 12 tons into orbit in reusable mode.

25:25 It too is intended to get, you know, grid fins and legs and stuff for booster recovery, but that will have to be proven in the future because the one launch demonstration it did in June of 2026, it reached orbit successfully, but no attempt was made to recover the booster. And so I'm pretty sure that covers all the rockets which were left off the list on my old video.

25:48 Many of these have already reached the end of their life as they found themselves having a hard time making money in a saturated launch market and they've been superseded by larger, more ambitious rockets by their uh you know manufacturers. And as I pointed out, a lot of these rockets do share a lot of DNA with or common stages with each other and with missiles because getting anything into space was the first order of business for these companies that had taken investment.

26:13 I'm sure we will see many more rockets coming out of China in coming years. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe.