China's CAS Space flew its Kinetica-2 rocket for the first time on March 30, 2026, putting a 4,200-kilogram prototype cargo spacecraft into orbit and marking the debut of what could become a second independent resupply route to the Tiangong space station. The launch, at 7:00 a.m. Eastern from the Dongfeng Commercial Aerospace Innovation Test Zone at Jiuquan, was China's 18th orbital attempt of the year. The vehicle — 53 meters tall, with a 3.35-meter-diameter universal core stage — carried the New Journey-02 spacecraft, a prototype precursor to the Qingzhou-1 cargo vehicle, along with 27 experimental payloads totaling 1,020 kilograms. SpaceNews
That prototype flight is the load-bearing fact for anyone tracking China's orbital logistics. The spacecraft involved — New Journey-02 — is a pathfinder for Qingzhou-1, one of two commercial cargo vehicles selected by the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) from ten proposals submitted in 2023. The winning pair, Qingzhou-1 and the Haolong cargo module, were chosen in October 2024. They join the existing state-owned Tianzhou freighter in what amounts to a deliberate redundancy play: two independent supply lines to an orbiting station, one commercial. SpaceNews SpaceNews
Qingzhou-1, when it flies operationally, will offer 27 cubic meters of cargo space and a capacity of 1,800 to 2,000 kilograms per mission. That's meaningfully smaller than Tianzhou — which hauls around 6.5 tonnes — but the architecture difference matters more than the raw numbers. Qingzhou-1 is a single-module spacecraft designed to launch on commercial rockets rather than being married to a specific heavy-lift vehicle. That decouples cargo supply from the state launch manifest, which is the whole point of the CMSEO competition. SpaceNews
On the rocket side, Kinetica-2 uses nine YF-102 kerosene-liquid oxygen engines — three per core, three per booster — all developed by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The vehicle is rated for up to 12,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, or roughly 8,000 kilograms to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. The engine counts are worth noting: nine combustion chambers firing in parallel is a straightforward but demanding propulsion architecture, and the Kinecore-2 engine — a 110-ton-force pintle-injector design — completed a 420-second hot fire test on March 13 that included a 200-second single burn, the longest in that test series. SpaceNews China-in-Space
The debut itself slipped about a year. Kinetica-2 was originally scheduled for 2025. The engine test cadence and integration work pushed it to March 2026. That's not unusual for a first flight, but it's worth noting that the rocket that just flew still has no demonstrated booster recovery — and that's where the commercial case either makes or breaks sense.
CAS Space founder and CEO Yang Yiqiang has said recovering and reflying at least 65 percent of the rocket's value is necessary for the economics to work. Booster recovery is planned for 2027. China-in-Space That's the gap: a clean debut in 2026, a reusability target in 2027, and an operational cargo spacecraft that hasn't flown yet. The prototype (New Journey-02) has a design lifetime of up to three years — enough runway to iterate, not enough to wait indefinitely.
The near-term schedule has CAS Space flying another Kinetica-2 mission in 2026 to deliver 18 Qianfan satellites for a Shanghai-backed broadband constellation. A sea launch of the smaller Kinetica-1 is also planned within 2026 — the founding team previously ran China's first commercial sea launch and appears to be picking up where they left off. China-in-Space Wikipedia
The dual-source resupply architecture is the most durable part of this story. China's having now effectively insured Tiangong's logistics against a single-vehicle failure by funding two parallel commercial programs — one state-owned (Tianzhou), one commercial (Qingzhou-1). Whether either Qingzhou vehicle actually achieves the reusability economics Yang Yiqiang says he needs is the open question. A 65-percent value recovery threshold is a high bar, and no Chinese commercial booster has demonstrated it yet. Falcon 9 set the template; Kinetica-2's family is three to four years behind it. That's not a disqualification — it's a schedule.
