China’s Astronstone raises $29 million for reusable rocket with chopstick-style recovery

Astronstone, the Beijing-based launch startup also known as Beijing Yushi Space Technology, has closed a Pre-A+ funding round of approximately $29 million, the company confirmed last week. Hillhouse Capital led the round, with Xingxiang Capital — affiliated with Hunan provincial government — and four other investors participating. The company has now raised roughly $72 million since its founding in mid-2024, a pace that reflects the capital intensity of building a large liquid rocket from scratch.

The hook is the architecture. Astronstone is the only team in China pursuing a stainless steel liquid methane rocket with a chopstick-style arm to catch the returning booster mid-air — the same broad approach SpaceX settled on with Starship. The AS-1 stands 70 meters tall, 4.2 meters in diameter, generates 700 tons of thrust from nine first-stage engines, and is targeting 10,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit in recovered mode. Those are real numbers attached to a vehicle that has not yet flown.

Tang Wen, the companys CEO and co-founder, has said the team has been working on the precision landing and capture problem since 2017, with flight test verification completed by 2019. That is relevant context for a company presenting itself as a fast mover. The CTO, Tian Jichao, brings 15 years of liquid rocket experience from Harbin Institute of Technology. The third co-founder is Zhu Xinwen. The current team stands at 170 people as of March 2026, with R&D staff comprising more than 70 percent, and the company is targeting 300 by year-end.

On hardware, there are genuine data points. The second stage completed its first static fire on December 22, 2025, running Jiuzhou Yunjians Longyun engine at 80 tons of thrust on a test stand Astronstone borrowed from Deep Blue Aerospace — a sign that the company is still building out its own ground infrastructure. The test verified the second-stage common dome design, which Astronstone claims is Chinas first stainless steel common dome. The company also ran a 78-day ground test of its chopstick capture arm in December, applying simulated catch forces exceeding 100 tons with over a thousand sensors instrumented across the arm assembly. That test is real. The booster it is meant to catch has not yet been shown publicly.

The stainless steel bet is the more interesting engineering argument. Tang Wen has said the material costs roughly one-quarter the price of the aluminum alloy traditionally used in rocket structures, while the companys integrated structural design keeps weight roughly comparable. Methane-liquid oxygen combustion is also cleaner to re-light than kerosene, reducing turnaround maintenance — the logic being that reusability only matters if the hardware comes back ready to fly again without extensive rework. Astronstone claims its chopstick recovery approach adds more than 15 percent to payload capacity versus landing legs, by eliminating the mass penalty of folding legs and their associated mechanisms. These are defensible engineering positions. They are not yet proven in flight.

The target cost of approximately $2,900 per kilogram to LEO in recovered mode is doing a lot of work in the coverage. That figure comes from the company. They have not launched the rocket, let alone recovered and reflow a booster. The Q1 2027 debut flight target is plausible but unproven — first-stage static fire is still ahead, and a static fire is not a flight.

What makes the story worth watching is the market signal underneath it. The demand side is clear: Chinese constellation plans from Xingwang Group and Yuanxin Satellite alone represent a target of nearly 30,000 satellites, requiring a scale of launch that no existing vehicle can economically provide at current prices. If anyone can build a vehicle that reliably delivers 10,000 kilograms at something close to the claimed cost, the customers are there. The question is whether Astronstone is the team that gets there first — or whether Landspace, Galactic Energy, or one of the other half-dozen Chinese reusable rocket programs reaches orbit first and learns faster from the hardware.

The Hillhouse backing is notable. The investment firm has not previously been associated with Chinese commercial launch, and its involvement suggests at least one institutional investor with no obvious aerospace ties looked at the stainless steel architecture, the cost model, and the market timing, and decided the thesis was worth backing. Qiancheng Capital, another investor, explicitly cited space-based solar power and space computing as the end markets it is investing toward.

The production footprint is taking shape. Astronstone operates a 15,000 square meter facility in Hunan province, where second-stage manufacturing and first production test tanks were built. A new 54,000 square meter facility in Zhuzhou, also in Hunan, is planned for assembly and production of up to eight AS-1 vehicles per year. That target — eight vehicles annually — is worth writing down. If they reach the point where that production rate is credible, the story changes.

Right now the story is: two-year-old company, solid engineering rationale, real hardware milestones, ambitious cost targets with no flight data yet, and a funding round that signals serious institutional interest in the commercial Chinese launch market. The chopsticks are built. The booster is not. First static fire is next. Watch the test stand, not the press release.

Sources: SpaceNews (https://spacenews.com/chinas-astronstone-raises-29-million-for-reusable-rocket-with-chopstick-style-recovery/), China in Space (https://www.china-in-space.com/p/astronstone-tests-prototype-reusable), China in Space (https://www.china-in-space.com/p/three-reusable-rockets-complete-tests), 36Kr (https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3189976512061316)