US intel officials “concerned” China will soon master reusable launch | “They have to have on-orbit refueling because they don’t access space as frequently as we do.”
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/09/us-intel-officials-cite-reusable-launch-as-difference-maker-with-china/
15 Comments
It will likely still take a few more years but inevitably more countries will have reusable launch vehicles.
With musk having businesses there, they could have this technology overnight plus more
It’s been proven to work so people who start to replicate it. Innovation never just stays in one place people will copy
~~Garbage article, if not garbage intel.~~
>”They have to have on-orbit refueling because they don’t access space as frequently as we do.”
The one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
The necessity of refueling is dependent on the destination and payload mass, not the flight rate. And you could even argue that refueling can only be done with _higher_ flight rates.
So this just serves as an indication that whoever wrote/caused the article has zero knowledge about space.
Edit: I re-read the article. For some reason a few paragraphs were not shown the first time.
It’s about on-orbit refueling and how the Chinese are using it to prolong the service life of their assets. As u/curiouslyjake explains this would enable the launch of smaller rockets with just the tanker, instead of the full satellite on a heavier rocket.
However this would not change the _frequency_ of launches. So in a sense my argument about the wording still stands, but a bit less about the content of the article.
There’s nothing particularly magical about what SpaceX is doing. Yes it’s rocket science, but it’s far from unfathomable. There’s no question that the Chinese will be prioritizing this capability for themselves, and zero reason to imagine that they won’t achieve it within a few years, and then rapidly develop it at scale.
Criticize their government for a lot of bad things – but they are *much* better at prioritizing strategic scientific and engineering initiatives than the US is. Just look at their astronomical solar build-out over the past few years. While in the US electrical bills are now rising much faster than inflation, in China they are flat or declining despite meteoric increases in demand.
They now *own* the world solar market, and they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future due to the US’s unwillingness to acknowledge that fossil fuels are no longer an economically viable future for energy production. It is reasonable to believe that similar outcomes will occur in the strategic space industries.
I kinda fail to see the *concerning* part here. They probably won’t reusable rockets to “deliver” explosive payloads.
What is this, the *red scare* of the 60s?
Probably not the worst for space enthusiasts to have a little competition again.
The US has ceded space dominance already with this administration.
ArsTechnica has become suprisingly China-simptastic here in the past year or so. It’s not an overwhelming amount but there are quite a few ~~sponsored posts~~ timely articles about how amazing and superior China is on a technology that no one has heard of their technology…. but yet is somehow vastly superior.
Knowing a thing is possible is game changing. “How do we do this?” And “can we even do this? Are two very different engineering problems.
I mean, isn’t that inevitable once SpaceX mastered the art of reuse rockets? Lucky thing is that we are 10 years ahead of them.
clearly the best way forward is to defund NASA. I can see no other way to go about it
Seems like the space shuttle program already taught us this lesson, reusable space craft are just a ticking bomb.
WE all want on orbit refueling. Elon is working on that as well. It makes things cheaper and we can go farther.
We also have a lot of fear about a country that really doesnt do a lot to us.. “oh no they might make a star link”.. well yeah i dont like all the sats interfering with astronomy.. but are we supposed to wall off space? cause if we dont everyone will join us some day.
I just dont see the point of hyping the fear
Is this ‘Intel Official’ Laura Loomer? They don’t seem to know jack about space. Starship, which NASA plans to land astronauts on both the Moon and Mars, depends on orbital refueling.
The concern is partly real, China is moving fast on reusable launch and lunar programs, but the bigger issue is the U.S. undercutting itself with unstable funding and political whiplash. America still has the stronger tech base, private sector, and launch cadence, yet constant budget cuts weaken long-term leadership. The real risk isn’t just China catching up, it’s the U.S. failing to match its stated ambitions with consistent investment. So maybe the problem isn’t China’s progress, but our own self-inflicted drift.