A New Space Race Above Earth May Determine Who Prevails Upon It

December 24, 2025 (NEO – Brian Berletic) - In early December 2025, private Chinese aerospace company, LandSpace, test-launched its Zhuque-3 rocket. The rocket is designed to place payloads into Earth orbit while recovering its first stage booster, much like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system and now Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. 

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 who 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 providing links to long-range drones (especially naval drones) 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 constellations as large as the US primarily because of limitations on how quickly launches can be conducted to place them into orbit. 

Throughout 2025, for example, the US conducted (approximately) 170 launches versus China’s 78, and Russia’s 15. 

In previous years, China had actually overtaken the US in annual launches. However, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system, this balance has been decisively tilted back in America’s favor.   

Zhuque-3 test launches are expected to continue throughout 2026 with the company aiming to continue reaching orbit while finally successfully landing the first stage booster. From there, it will depend on how quickly and reliably LandSpace can repeat this success as well as how fast it can expand both rocket production and supporting infrastructure to significantly expand its launch cadence.

Just as SpaceX – a single aerospace company – has radically expanded US access to orbit, LandSpace could be positioned to do likewise for China. 

However, just as the US now has Blue Origin pursuing its own reusable launch system, China has several other private companies and state-owned enterprises aiming to do likewise. 

Private company Space Pioneer with its Tianlong-3 rocket and China’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology – under the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) – with its Long March 12A rocket are both planning to launch and possibly attempt to recover first stage boosters in late 2025 to early 2026. 

Both rockets represent systems similar in size and with roughly similar potential capabilities as SpaceX’s Falcon 9. 

Russia, on the other hand, had announced its Amur (or Soyuz-7) launch system as a candidate for reusable launches, but has drastically delayed its development to prioritize the production and launch of existing rockets, including newer launch systems much closer to completion. This includes continued Soyuz crewed and uncrewed flights, Proton launches, the planned initial launch of Soyuz-5 which is intended to replace the older Proton system, and continued launches of Russia’s relatively new family of Angara rockets. 

Thus, the likelihood of Russia developing its own reusable launch capability in the near future is low. However, as a close partner with China, it will likely benefit from any success China achieves in the near future in a variety of ways.  

Purpose-Driven Capabilities Exploited by Primacy-Driven Interests 

SpaceX and Blue Origin ostensibly claim their primary objective is to expand humanity beyond Earth. SpaceX has been focused on the colonization of Mars while Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has made proposals for massive orbital habitats (similar to those proposed by physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970s) in his 2019 “For the Benefit of Earth” talk. 

Both companies are also participating in NASA’s bid to return human beings to the moon. 

However, whatever truth there is behind these purpose-driven objectives, both US-based companies exist within a profit-driven system engaged in the pursuit of global primacy, increasingly using the capabilities these companies have developed not  “for the benefit of Earth,” but to dominate it. 

Blue Origin-developed rocket engines, the BE-4, have already been used on joint Lockheed-Boeing United Launch Alliance (ULA) missions for the US NRO.

In addition to SpaceX’s collaboration with the NRO in the creation of Starshield, it has for years regularly conducted launches for the US Space Force, and before that, the US Air Force. These capabilities, in turn, have enabled continued US global military encroachment and aggression targeting both Russia and China’s partners and allies, as well as threatening both nations themselves. 

SpaceX is an anomaly amid the US aerospace industry – an industry that has for decades been driven by the pursuit of profit over any other purpose, including innovation. 

Before SpaceX’s Falcon 9 became operational, most US national security payloads were launched using United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. Both rockets were fully expendable. Their designs represented upgrades of rockets and systems from as early as the 1960’s. Because ULA (and before that, Boeing and Lockheed which merged to create ULA) held a monopoly over orbital launches and existed solely to maximize profit – there was no need to innovate. Any excess revenue diverted toward research and development would only have undermined shareholder primacy. 

SpaceX, a private corporation founded by Elon Musk, disrupted the comfortable monopoly Boeing and Lockheed enjoyed, prioritizing rapid innovation over shareholder profits. Not only has SpaceX succeeded in cutting edge innovation, it is also making profits and outcompeting Boeing and Lockheed’s ULA. 

Initially, lobbyists representing established aerospace corporations attempted to block SpaceX’s entry into government launches. Today, US policy think tanks funded by corporations like Boeing and Lockheed, hold SpaceX up as an example of the innovation possible because of the American system. In reality, SpaceX succeeded despite it. 

These same policymakers now seek to exploit the capabilities a purpose-driven SpaceX developed to enhance the continued profit and power-driven pursuit of US primacy.

Russia and China, on the other hand, have entirely purpose-driven state-owned enterprises engaged in every aspect of national development – from energy production, to military industrial production, and aerospace research and development. 

Russia’s limitations come in the form of its smaller population and economy and the constraints placed on it by ongoing US containment and confrontation, especially amid the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine. While it is unlikely Russia can now match or exceed the capabilities enabled by SpaceX, Russia had previously surpassed the US in terms of launch capabilities – at one point shuttling US astronauts to and from the International Space Station for years because of the inability of US aerospace monopolies to develop a timely replacement for the Space Shuttle. 

China, on the other hand, has a larger economy, a vastly larger industrial base, more modern and extensive infrastructure, and millions more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates each year than the US. Together with purpose-driven state-owned enterprises and national policy promoting purpose-driven private business, China has already surpassed the United States across a number of fields and will almost certainly surpass US space launch capabilities in both quality and quantity, barring extreme preemptive measures taken by the US. 

A New Space Race – New Rules 

SpaceX’s Elon Musk, in regards to the test launch of Zhuque-3, remarked that even if it is successful, by the time it reaches large-scale production and use, SpaceX’s next-generation launch system – Starship – will have surpassed it. 

However, linear comparisons to China’s development have proven tragically flawed. 

Just because it took years for China to catch up to the US in terms of space launch capabilities before SpaceX pushed the US back into the lead, and now it has taken several more years for China to begin developing and testing its own reusable rockets, doesn’t mean it will take the same amount of time to match SpaceX’s Starship, or that China won’t be able to leapfrog US space launch capabilities altogether. 

China is already developing the super-heavy Long March 9 and 10 launch systems meant to perform the same roles as SpaceX’s Starship, with engine production and testing already ongoing.

While the US has one purpose-driven space launch company – perhaps two (Blue Origin) – China represents a vastly larger purpose-driven nation with all the ingredients necessary to not only rapidly match the US, but permanently surpass it.

In an overall military, economic, and industrial competition the US is losing to China in virtually all regards, it is unlikely to maintain its advantage over China in terms of space launch capabilities – especially considering these capabilities were developed despite the primary characteristics of America’s socio-economic and political system, not because of it.  

Should China fail to catch up to the US for a variety of reasons – including ongoing US ambitions to encircle and contain China with chaos, conflict, and even proxy war in the same manner it has done so to Russia – a large and dangerous advantage will be given to the US who has long-since demonstrated an eager desire to fully exploit it economically and even militarily. 

The lopsided access to space afforded by reusable launch systems means placing not only larger and more capable satellite constellations into orbit, it also means being able to target and remove the constellations of others from orbit. 

This includes the use of co-orbital satellites (sometimes called “killer satellites” or “inspector satellites”) able to approach the satellites of other nations. Nations like the US with a high launch cadence can quickly put new, more advanced co-orbital satellites into orbit, or replace any losses from an adversary’s co-orbital or anti-satellite capabilities. 

This represents a lopsided balance of power in orbit, creating a potentially lopsided balance of power back on Earth. 

Only time will tell whether or not China’s ability to match the US in all matters on Earth can be extended over this new space race above it.  

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.