Jiuzhou Yunjian九州云箭

Jiuzhou Yunjian sells the engine everyone needs. Its Longyun is a 70 to 80 tonne methalox engine built for reuse, with deep throttling and multiple restarts, offered to any Chinese rocket builder rather than reserved for a house vehicle. Ji Fenghua left the state academies to start it in 2017, after ten years on liquid rocket engines, and the position is the classic picks-and-shovels one: whichever reusable rocket wins, the engine seller gets paid.

The engines have flown twice, with opposite endings. One Longyun powered Space Epoch's sea-recovery hop in May 2025, throttling and reigniting in flight exactly as designed. Seven flew on the first stage of the state's Long March 12A that December, reached orbit, and then failed the landing when only two of three engines relit for the final burn, putting the booster into the ground five kilometres from the pad.

That relight failure struck the company's core promise, restart on demand. The customer list is thin besides: the first buyer, Rocket Pi, never flew; Space Epoch has yet to reach orbit; and the marquee customer is a state academy that could build its own engines whenever it chooses. The bet pays only if China's reusable rocket boom arrives faster than its customers run out of runway.