SpaceX Falcon lands on its feet, China on the net – How will Isro’s reusable rocket return home?

China’s recovery of a rocket booster for the first time on Friday — using a net-and-hook system to capture the first stage of a Long March-10B return on an offshore platform — has renewed interest in countries and companies chasing reusable rocket technology.

China is only the second country, after the United States, to recover an intact orbital rocket booster. The company behind Friday’s launch, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, is the third company in the world to master the feat — after SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in 2015, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn in November 2025.

India has a program as well, although there is no confirmed schedule for it yet.

The program’s first major flight test took place on May 23, 2016, when ISRO launched its Reusable Technology Launch Vehicle (RLV-TD) from Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.

The winged vehicle, which resembles an aircraft with a fuselage, nose flap, twin delta wings and twin vertical tails, was boosted to Mach 5 by a conventional solid booster before being launched for hypersonic flight testing, autonomous navigation and a reusable thermal protection system.

As part of the mission, known as HEX, the vehicle slid toward a virtual runway over the Bay of Bengal, ISRO said. An accurate landing on an actual runway was not among the mission objectives, meaning HEX validated the physics of hypersonic reentry, but did not record the actual recovery.

ISRO returned to runway landing testing after seven years. On 2 April 2023, it conducted an RLV autonomous landing mission (RLV LEX) at the flight test range in Chitradurga, Karnataka.

Read also: More than a decade after SpaceX, China successfully launched a rocket boosted with hooks and a net. How different is the technology?

An Indian Air Force Chinook helicopter lifted the winged RLV to an altitude of 4.5 km and released it into the air. The aircraft then used its on-board navigation, guidance and control systems to approach and land autonomously on the airstrip, landing at a landing speed of approximately 350 kilometers per hour.

Isro described the method of shooting down the helicopter as the first of its kind in the world for a winged object.

A second, more stringent version of the test – RLV LEX-02 – followed on March 22, 2024, on the same scale. This time, the winged vehicle, named Pushpak, was deliberately launched off its ideal flight path — sideways and along its line of approach — to test whether it could correct the course entirely on its own.

It is possible. The vehicle was adjusted mid-flight and landed accurately on the runway, braking to a stop using the parachute, landing brake and steerable nose wheel.

The same airframe and flight systems used on the LEX-01 were reused in the LEX-02 after recertification, demonstrating the potential for reusing the same flight hardware.

The repeated success has helped ISRO master autonomous final-stage maneuvering and energy management, a critical step toward the agency’s future missions, S. Unnikrishnan Nair, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center (VSSC) — ISRO’s primary launch vehicle design center — said in an official statement.

The next step is the planned RLV Orbital Reentry Experiment (ORE), in which the RLV will be carried into orbit on top of an ascent stage built using technology already installed on Isro’s existing GSLV and PSLV rockets. It will then remain in orbit for a specified period, before re-entering and landing autonomously on the runway: the first real test of an Indian orbital-class RLV. There is no known date for this.

Read also: India and Pakistan: Space competition and the governance challenge

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster performs a supported vertical landing. Its Merlin engines execute a series of braking burns, and the booster lands upright on its landing legs, either on a ground pad or on a floating drone ship.

Read also: Vikram-1, India’s first private orbital rocket will be launched this month

China’s Long March-10B rocket also returns vertically under engine power, but instead of legs, it deploys four hooks that catch a net suspended across an offshore platform — a design that its maker says simplifies the rocket’s on-board structure, reduces its mass, and adds payload capacity.

Both are, essentially, propulsive landings: the rocket’s special engines do the work of slowing and controlling the final descent.

RLV in India is fundamentally different. It is an unpowered glider in its final phase, described by Isro as a “spaceplane” with a low lift-to-drag ratio and the engine not running during the descent itself. It is a lifting body that uses its wings, wings (the flaps on the trailing edge of the wings) and rudder to control an aerodynamic landing, just like a miniature airplane or space shuttle, before landing horizontally on the runway using conventional landing gear, brakes and a parachute.

There is no landing burn — the rocket engine fire that SpaceX and China use to slow down their boosters — and no vertical landing at all.

Isro says the winged vehicle is a prototype that is meant to scale up to the first stage of a fully reusable two-stage orbital launch vehicle — conceptually similar to SpaceX and China’s approach, but returning to Earth via a completely different route.

Read also: Before India’s space feat, ISRO had to put a 673-kg satellite on an ox cart

When asked about the program in February this year, Isro chief V. Narayanan said the space agency did not see itself in the SpaceX race. “We do not see this as competition with anyone,” he told reporters in Pune, but acknowledged that reusable rockets are more cost-effective and that Isro is actively developing the technology.

He described the program as being in a pilot phase, without providing a timeline for practical deployment. The remarks came at a time when Isro was also working to overcome recent setbacks with its PSLV rocket after two mission failures in May 2025 and January 2026.