(Yicai) Aug. 19 -- China has successfully recovered a rocket's first stage on land, marking another key space technology milestone for the country less than two months after a similar feat was achieved at sea.

The Zhuque-3 Y2 carrier rocket lifted off from the Dongfeng commercial space innovation test zone in China’s northwest yesterday. After reaching orbit, the rocket's first stage was recovered at a landing site in Minqin county, Gansu province.

The mission was China's first recovery of a carrier rocket's first stage using landing legs, as well as its first land-based capture of an orbital-class launch vehicle's first stage, LandSpace Technology, the Zhuque-3’s Beijing-based developer, told Yicai.

It was also a milestone for the Zhuque-3, a next-generation reusable liquid oxygen-methane rocket, as it moved from testing the recovery technology to validating the engineering’s ability to be reused, the firm added.

Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Enterprises, have pioneered similar rocket recovery technologies.

After stage separation, the vehicle’s first stage entered the return phase according to its pre-set flight program, completing a series of critical maneuvers, including high-altitude attitude adjustment, re-entry ignition for powered deceleration, aerodynamic glide control, landing ignition deceleration, and landing leg deployment, before a stable touchdown on its legs, LandSpace said.

The mission used LandSpace's self-developed, non-pyrotechnic stacked clamping and release mechanism, to further validate its performance in a real flight situation and support future large-scale constellation networking, rapid batch deployment, and improved launch efficiency, the company added.

China’s first successful controlled recovery of a space rocket at sea took place on July 10.

Reusable rockets can effectively reduce launch costs and increase launch frequency by recovering the first stage, which accounts for more than 70 percent of a rocket's total cost, according to statistics from LandSpace.

The number of times a first stage can be reused cannot be determined solely by design specifications, LandSpace pointed out. It must be established through extensive operation experience involving repeated launches, recoveries, inspections, maintenance, refurbishments, improvements, ground test evaluations, as well as reliability and life-span assessments.

Editor: Futura Costaglione