China's first offshore test platform for liquid-fueled rocket launch and recovery is nearing completion at the Oriental Spaceport in Haiyang, Yantai, east China's Shandong Province. Located at the country's only commercial offshore launch mother port, the facility is expected to complete construction and enter commissioning and rehearsal testing around February 5.

Around the Spring Festival in mid-February, a domestic developed mainstream commercial liquid-fueled rocket is scheduled to conduct a launch-and-recovery test at the site. This will mark China's first-ever offshore launch and recovery test involving a liquid-fueled rocket.

The year 2026 marks the start of China's 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030), during which "accelerating the building of a space power" has been included as a key national task for the first time.

Previously, the Oriental Spaceport has carried out 22 offshore launch missions, all using solid-fueled rockets. While solid rockets offer strong mobility and flexible launch options, they have relatively limited payload capacity and cannot be recovered. Liquid-fueled rockets, by contrast, have greater payload capacity and can be recovered and reused, significantly reducing the cost of satellite constellation deployment. As a result, reusable liquid rocket launches have become a major direction for China's commercial space sector.

As China's only offshore launch mother port, Oriental Spaceport has so far sent 137 satellites into space.