It saves you from all those dead-ends, since you know that everything you try CAN work, as long as you just look over the better student’s paper very carefully.

But we all know things are way cheaper in cost controlled China.

Hopping and landing vehicles of roughly the size of the one pictured – and some that were bigger – was pioneered two decades ago by the late Masten Space and Armadillo Aerospace companies. The Masten vehicles,, at least, are still in service as research testbeds, though now owned by lunar lander company Astrobotic. The one new wrinkle in these PRC tests is using a floating barge from which to perform the launching and to which the vehicle returns for landing.

All of this being said, one hesitates to indict the PRC for being so far behind the times as few in Western aerospace have done anything even comparable to these tests either, though it seems that may change in the next couple of years if Relativity Space and Stoke Space manage to do what they intend. Recoverability of even the booster stage of a vehicle large enough to put a significant payload into orbit is still very much TBD in the PRC. Given the growing demographic and economic disintegration of the PRC, time, in this endeavor, is very much not on the PRC’s side.

As do China’s moon and Mars rovers with respect to JPL’s robotic explorers, lol. Imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery, but it is nice to have someone else do all of the laborious, test to destruction and then try again R&D work for you proving that, yes, it can be done.