Special to CosmicTribune.com, June 18, 2026

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) revealed in August 2023 that it was working to compile a 100-year plan to populate the Earth’s nearby solar system.

Thus, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which specializes in long term plans would require large rockets to move heavy payloads to the Moon and Mars.

For close the fifteen years Chinese space officials, deputized academic spokesmen, politicians, and wide array of “grey” sources have been revealing bits about the evolution of CASC’s Long March-9 (LM-9) space launch vehicle (SLV), which could be China’s main heavy lift SLV for a number of decades.

In terms of their public histories, the Long March-9 has roughly paralleled the SpaceX Starship — which was first at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Elon Musk himself (this analyst was in the audience) there introduced the 400-ft tall Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) to take 100 people to Mars — with reusable first and second stages.

Also in 2016, the first images of what would be called the Long March-9 appeared on Chinese military issue web pages, as a three-stage 50-ton to the Moon payload rocket that also used strap-on boosters but did not feature reusability.

However, the CCP decided that it had to have the innovations of Starship and ordered that Long March-9 be redesigned to incorporate reusability, and new single-stack versions with one or two reusable stages were being revealed in the 2022-2023 period, and the formal unveiling of a large single stack design model at the 2024 Zhuhai Airshow.

But in early June, the government of China’s Hainan Province, which hosts the Wencheng Satellite Launch Center from which the Long March-9 will be launched, posted a trove of online documents for the “Wencheng Rocket Base Project (Phase 1) of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.”

These documents detailing the factory to be built for the Long March-9, close by the Wencheng launch center, showed dimensions of the buildings intended for rocket production.

These documents detailed size of factory and also revealed new details regarding the future dimensions of the Long March-9 — with the caveat that such estimates have not yet been “confirmed” by official Chinese sources, while Chinese internet speculators can be creative.

But nevertheless, it is worth noting that these sources suggest Long March-9 could have three stages, with a height of 165 to 185 meters — compared to 124 meters for the Starship Block 3.

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