BEIJING, July 10 — China’s push into reusable rocketry has a clear technical lineage, and the man now steering its next phase is an engineer from Sichuan with a doctorate from Beihang University and more than 50 papers on landing systems. Li Jun, chief designer of the Long March 10 series at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, or CALT, represents the second generation of Chinese rocket architects who have moved from expendable launchers to vehicles that can fly back and land.
Data from CASC, CALT’s parent company, shows Li’s career tracks the country’s ambition to compete with SpaceX in the reusable launch market. Born in 1972, Li earned his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Beihang University in 2000.
He joined CALT the following year and cut his teeth on the Long March 2F, the rocket that launched China’s Shenzhou crewed spacecraft. That work gave him deep familiarity with human-rating requirements — safety margins, redundancy, abort systems — that now inform his current designs.
From the Long March 8 to full reusability
In 2015, CALT appointed Li chief designer of the Long March 8, China’s first partially reusable rocket. That vehicle first flew in December 2020 and established the baseline for controlled vertical landings. Officials noted at the time that the Long March 8 was designed specifically to test recovery technologies that could scale to larger launchers.
Li then led the design of the Long March 10B, a rocket that incorporated lessons from both the Long March 8R test flights and from studying SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The company has not disclosed detailed comparisons, but Li’s team developed the rocket’s grid fin control system and landing leg mechanism — the two subsystems most critical for a propulsive landing.
Those components were tested on a suborbital reusable test vehicle in 2020, years before the Long March 10B’s maiden flight. The test vehicle allowed engineers to validate control algorithms and structural loads without the cost of a full orbital mission. The Long March 10B’s successful maiden flight on July 12, 2024, was hailed by CASC as a “milestone” for Chinese rocketry.
The company said the flight demonstrated the rocket’s ability to deliver payloads to low Earth orbit while retaining the first stage for refurbishment and reuse.
Patents, papers, and a state award
Li has published over 50 papers on rocket reusability, covering topics from grid fin aerodynamics to landing leg deployment kinematics. He holds 15 patents related to reusable launch vehicles, according to CALT records. In 2021, he received the State Science and Technology Progress Award (Second Class) for his work on reusable launch vehicles.
That award, one of China’s highest scientific honors, recognized the practical engineering advances that made the Long March 8 and Long March 10B possible. Industry analysts tracking China’s launch vehicle development point to Li’s dual focus — theoretical publication and hands-on hardware — as a model that CALT has deliberately cultivated.
The company has increasingly rotated its top designers through both research institutes and production facilities.
What comes next
With the Long March 10B now operational, Li’s team at CALT is expected to focus on increasing the rocket’s reuse rate and reducing turnaround time between flights. The Long March 10 series is designed to support China’s space station resupply missions and, eventually, crewed lunar missions, though CALT has not announced a specific timeline for those applications. The broader market context matters here.
China’s commercial launch sector has grown rapidly over the past five years, with private firms like LandSpace and Galactic Energy competing for contracts. CASC, as the state-owned giant, retains the institutional memory and manufacturing scale that private startups lack.
Li’s work on reusability directly addresses the cost pressure that those private competitors are creating. For Central Asian observers watching the space launch market — Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome still hosts Russian launches, and the region’s satellite operators buy rides on Chinese rockets — Li’s progress signals that Chinese launch prices could fall further as reuse matures. That has trade implications for everything from Earth observation data to telecommunications bandwidth.
Officials at CALT have not commented on specific cost reductions from the Long March 10B’s first reuse flight. But Li’s published papers indicate that his team is targeting at least ten reuses per first-stage core, a benchmark that would put Chinese launch economics in the same conversation as Falcon 9’s current performance.
