China's Long March-10B rocket feat lights up social media: is SpaceX…

China successfully recovered a reusable Long March-10B rocket booster using a novel sea-based net-and-cable system, breaking SpaceX's decade-long monopoly on economical rocket reuse. Goldman Sachs simultaneously raised LEO satellite deployment forecasts sevenfold to 305,000 units by 2031, citing reusable rocket breakthroughs as the enabling technology. Launch costs just halved at scale, and there are now two suppliers instead of one. If you're building anything that needs orbit access—comms, Earth observation, data services—your unit economics and timeline to deployment have shifted this week.