Deep Blue Aerospace深蓝航天

Deep Blue Aerospace decided to learn landing before learning orbit. Every other Chinese launch startup flew to space first and deferred recovery. Deep Blue's Nebula test vehicles have been hopping and landing since 2021, including a kilometre-high flight in 2022 that set down within half a metre of its aim point, the second kerolox vehicle anywhere to manage that after SpaceX's Grasshopper.

The cost of the sequencing is that ten years after Huo Liang founded the company, it has never reached orbit. A high-altitude recovery test in September 2024 met ten of eleven objectives and then dropped out of the sky in the last seconds when its engines shut down early; another test vehicle was reportedly lost in mid-2025, this time without an announcement. The orbital rocket, Nebula-1, uses nine electric-pump engines and carries about two tonnes, and has been waiting at the Haiyang sea launch site since spring 2026 for a debut that keeps sliding.

The company also sold China's first publicly offered space tourism tickets, two seats on a planned 2027 suborbital flight, auctioned on a Taobao livestream before three million viewers. Selling rides to space before reaching it takes confidence the flight record does not yet supply. The engineering, though, keeps working the one problem that decides reusable rockets, which is the landing.