Commercial spaceflight "trial and error" is indispensable; the growth potential is worth safeguarding.

Securities Times reporter Zang Xiaosong

Recently, after Tianbing Technology Tianlong No. 3 (a private commercial launch vehicle) was fired and took off, an anomaly occurred. The flight test failed to fully achieve the intended mission objectives. This loss brings the public a reality of commercial spaceflight being high-risk and high-difficulty. In the current moment when the industry is entering a phase of tackling technological challenges in a concentrated way, on the one hand, timely lessons and reflection are indispensable; on the other hand, the public should also have greater tolerance for the necessary “trial and error,” so as to leave more room for growth for the high-quality development of China’s commercial spaceflight.

Today, the entire commercial spaceflight industry has already moved, as a whole, from the early stage of validating flight phases, into a concentrated campaign period of tackling higher technical complexity, such as larger payload capacity and reusability. In this stage, the scale of system integration has expanded significantly, and the degree of engineering coupling has increased markedly. Against this backdrop, in the past two years, multiple mainstream private rocket enterprises have encountered setbacks during either development or launch.

Setbacks are not what is scary. More important than a “successful first launch” is establishing an efficient technological iteration mechanism—accumulating data, exposing problems, and optimizing solutions through flight test after flight test, until finally forming a mature technology system that fits the needs of China’s space industry.

Looking at the world, technical trial and error is itself a common rule in the development of commercial spaceflight. Before SpaceX achieved large-scale success with Falcon 9, its early Falcon 1 had already failed to launch three times in a row. As the next-generation heavy reusable rocket, Starship also saw multiple incidents such as explosions during its test flights. Even so, founder Elon Musk still publicly affirmed the phased results, defining them as “failures that lead to success,” emphasizing that test data and technological progress move forward.

From a more macro perspective, we need to maintain strategic resolve when it comes to technological setbacks in the development of commercial spaceflight. Commercial spaceflight is an important part of China’s space “new infrastructure,” shouldering important missions for the future, including high-density, low-cost launches of tens of thousands of satellites. 2026 is the first-launch year for reusable rockets. From April to December, multiple companies, including Blue Arrow Aerospace, Galaxy Power, and Interstellar Glory, will conduct first launches and return-and-recovery validation in a concentrated manner. Domestically, private commercial spaceflight has clearly planned 22–27 launches. In this process, the necessary “trial and error” should receive even greater tolerance, and the industry’s room to grow is worth protecting. Only by facing risks squarely, embracing trial and error, summarizing lessons from experience and setbacks, and continuously optimizing and upgrading can commercial spaceflight move from “able to fly” to “reliable and scalable,” achieving a capability leap on higher dimensions.

(Editor-in-Charge: Dong Pingping)

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