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The global launch market reached $14.1 billion in 2024 — up 34% since 2021.
| Attribute | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Company | ExPace (CASIC subsidiary) | Firefly Aerospace / Northrop Grumman | LandSpace |
| Country | 🇨🇳 China | 🇺🇸 USA | 🇨🇳 China |
| Status | Active | In Development | Active |
| Vehicle class | Small | Medium | Medium |
| Propellant | Solid (3 stages) + liquid upper stage | RP-1 / LOX | Methalox (LOX / liquid methane) |
| Reusable | No | Yes | No |
| Stages | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| First flight | 2020 | 2027 | 2024 |
| Payload to LEO | 1,500 kgas of [1] | 16,000+ kgas of [1]5 m fairing. Renamed from 'Medium Launch Vehicle' (MLV) to 'Eclipse' in May 2025 alongside the Northrop Grumman partnership. First stage (7 Miranda engines) designed for reuse from roughly the 6th flight onward; second stage uses one Vira engine. First flight targeted 2027 — stated plan, not yet flown. ↑ Best | 6,000 kgas of [1]4,000 kg to 500 km SSO. Enhanced variant of the base Zhuque-2 with a common-bulkhead tank, TQ-15 thrust-vectoring engine on stage 2, and a niobium-alloy nozzle extension. A further-improved Block 2 first flew 2026-05-14 with subcooled propellant loading and a 3-ignition second stage. |
| Payload to GTO | — | — | — |
| Height | — | — | — |
| Liftoff mass | 78 tas of [1]Transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) capable. ↑ Best | — | — |
| Success rate | 80% (4/5)as of [1]Debut flight (2020-07-10) failed; returned to flight 2022-12-07 successfully. | — | 100% since 2024-11-27 debutas of [1] ↑ Best |
| Total flights | 5as of [1] | — | 2+ (2E variant)as of [1] ↑ Best |
| Cost / kg LEO | — | — | — |
| Summary | The larger sibling of Kuaizhou-1A, roughly 3.75x the payload class, road-mobile and solid-fueled, recovering commercial cadence after a 2020 debut failure. | A medium-lift successor to Firefly's Alpha, co-developed with Northrop Grumman, aimed at the national-security and commercial medium-lift gap between small launchers and heavy-lift vehicles. | LandSpace's enhanced methalox launcher, the higher-performance successor to the original Zhuque-2 (the first methalox rocket ever to reach orbit, in 2023) — see slug 'zhuque-2' for the original vehicle already in our database. |
48 launch vehicles across 10 countries — active, retired, and in development — with primary-source citations from manufacturer user guides and agency press kits. Pure URL state: bookmark or share the link and the comparison reproduces exactly.