China's New Heavy Lift Rocket Looks A Whole Lot Like SpaceX's Starship

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Headlines:

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When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country's first super heavy-lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides.

Since then, China has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, in response to the development of reusable rockets by SpaceX. As of two years ago , China had recalibrated the design to have a reusable first stage.

Now, based on information released at a major airshow in Zhuhai, the design has morphed again. And this time, the plan for the Long March 9 rocket looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX's Starship rocket.

In related news, last week, a quasi-private Chinese space startup, Cosmoleap, announced plans to develop a fully reusable ⁘Leap⁘ rocket within the next few years. An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX successfully employed during Starship's fifth flight test last month.

Let's be real for a minute. These are not the first times Chinese rocket programs have emulated SpaceX, such as when Space Pioneer planned to develop a Falcon 9 clone . Both the state-run rocket agency and the company's private industries are copying the best practices of SpaceX as they seek to catch up. At this point, China's launch industry is basically hanging out in the SpaceX waiting room to see which ideas it should swipe next.

By contrast, US policymakers seem determined to force NASA to continue building the ultraexpensive and expendable Space Launch System rocket for decades. This consumes a NASA budget that could otherwise be directed toward the kind of technological advances that might keep the US civil space program ahead of China.