Future Technology[Space & Future Tech] Two boosters landed themselves this fortnight
China just became the second country ever to catch a rocket booster after it flew to orbit. It's the same trick SpaceX has been doing since 2023, but do it twice and it stops being one company's party trick and starts being how orbit works.
The Big 3
China lands a rocket booster on a net at sea, and it isn't a fluke
On 10 July, China's Long March 10B flew for the first time and, a few minutes later, its first stage descended onto a net-like platform on a ship in the Yellow Sea, intact. It's the second time any country has recovered an orbital-class booster after flight, and China did it on the rocket's maiden flight, not after a dozen practice attempts the way SpaceX needed. The net catch, rather than a propulsive leg landing, is a genuinely different engineering approach: no legs, just a floating structure the booster has to hit within a few metres. CNSA hasn't said when Long March 10B enters regular service, and one good catch is not the same as routine reuse, but it's a real result on hardware, not a simulation.
Why this matters: Long March 10B is the rocket China is counting on for its own lunar landing programme, and a reusable heavy-lift booster changes the maths on how many launches that programme can afford.
Starship's 13th flight aborted itself, and that's the point of testing
Starship Flight 13 was seconds from liftoff on 16 July when four Super Heavy engines failed to ignite and the flight computer pulled the plug. SpaceX is swapping two Raptors and now targets 23 July at 10:45pm UTC, though treat that the way you'd treat any Starship date: as the earliest possible, not the confirmed one, given this is the vehicle's third scrub or abort this year. The mission itself is more ambitious than most: 20 Starlink V3 satellites, plus six cameras dedicated to watching the heat shield, including tiles deliberately painted white to track damage.
Why this matters: an automatic abort that catches a bad engine before ignition is the launch pad equivalent of a car not starting instead of catching fire on the motorway, which is exactly what a safety system is for.
A quantum computer just solved a problem fusion power has been stuck on
Researchers at IBM, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Cleveland Clinic used a 156-qubit IBM Heron chip to calculate nine molecular configurations of FLiBe, the molten salt most fusion reactor designs rely on to breed tritium fuel. The calculation answers something classical supercomputers couldn't pin down at useful precision: whether tritium stays trapped in the salt or escapes as gas, which decides whether a reactor's fuel-breeding blanket actually works. This is a chemistry result, not a fusion reactor turning on, and no commercial plant is any closer to running because of it. But it's a genuine case of quantum computing doing something classical machines struggle with, on a problem that matters.
Why this matters: tritium is one of the rarest materials on Earth, roughly 20kg produced a year, and this calculation targets the exact bottleneck that's kept fusion fuel supply theoretical.
Quick Hits
70 countries have now signed the Artemis Accords. Mauritius joined on 17 July, taking the total to 70 nations across every inhabited continent. It's a framework, not a treaty with teeth, and China and Russia remain outside it running their own lunar cooperation instead. Read more →
An Earth-sized world sits in its star's habitable zone, 25 light-years away. GJ 3378b, roughly twice Earth's size, was confirmed on 1 July. Twenty-five light-years is close enough that a future large telescope could plausibly study its atmosphere directly, though whether it's actually habitable is a different question nobody can answer yet. Read more →
Japan's Hayabusa2 flew past a second asteroid on its extended mission. Having already delivered a sample of Ryugu back to Earth in 2020, JAXA's spacecraft used its leftover fuel for a flyby of near-Earth asteroid Torifune this fortnight. No sample this time, just images and instrument readings from a mission that technically finished years ago. Read more →
Future Watch
Starship Flight 13, retry targeted for 23 July, 10:45pm UTC, Starbase, Texas. It's carrying the first Starlink V3 satellites and a dedicated heat shield inspection payload, the two things standing between Starship and routine cargo and crew flights. Watch for whether all Super Heavy engines light cleanly this time, and whether the ship survives re-entry with its deliberately damaged tiles. Live coverage on SpaceX's webcast.
The Long View
Two boosters landed themselves this fortnight, one on legs, one on a net, from two countries that weren't exactly swapping rocketry notes a decade ago. Reusability stopped being SpaceX's trick sometime in the last two years; it's now just what "landing a rocket" means. The interesting question isn't whether more countries will chase it, but how fast the price of orbit actually falls once they do.
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