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In about an hour, Chinese space startup Landspace is set to launch their ZhuQue-3 rocket, which if all goes well will become the fourth orbital class rocket to land back on Earth. Which would make China the second country to do it.

After SpaceX's Falcon-9 which has been landing for 500+ times over the last ten years (!) and SpaceX's Starship Superheavy booster with its spectacular tower catches! Joined recently by Blue Origin's New Glenn which just accomplished it last month.

Nobody else is even close. Both Roscosmos and the European Space Agency have plans to build reusable rockets, but both are years away. Russia probably won't accomplish much as long as the Ukraine war is going, and Europe got off to much too late a start. (After originally dismissing reusable rockets as "a dream".) So it's just the US and China in the game at present.

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There doesn't appear to be any live-stream.

X accounts that cover the Chinese space program (there are quite a few) are

https://x.com/CNSpaceflight

https://x.com/Cosmic_Penguin

Last information they had was that propellant load was underway

Well, ZhuQue-3 seemingly got off the pad ok, but a terrible tracking shot failed to follow it.

https://x.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1996069584043114567

Unclear what happened then. Some reports are saying that stage separation was good and that its dummy payload succeeded in reaching orbit. I'm not entirely convinced of that.

But whatever happened after launch, it's certain that the booster failed to land. Video of its last moments in the X post below. It was clearly on fire as it failed to decelerate and struck the ground at a high rate of speed.

https://x.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1996070053436162482

Despite its landing burn suffering a fatal failure, it did crash very close to its landing pad out in the sparsely populated Gobi desert though, which is a positive thing. Its guidance was still working.

Landspace has released rather good onboard video of the ZhuQue flight. It shows stage separation and fairing deploy, which suggests that the second stage did in fact achieve orbit. That's a victory for them.

There is some onboard video of the booster landing attempt, but nothing that shows the failed landing burn ignition.

The fact that it erupted into a big fireball when the landing burn ignition was supposed to happen suggests to me that an engine might have exploded which took out the other engines and ruptured the propellant feed lines feeding the fire. The fact that the booster didn't visibly decelerate at all suggests that none of its engines were functioning for the landing burn.

https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1996984972360536523

Here's video of its last moments

https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1996094893010419832