By Eduardo Baptista BEIJING, Dec 23 (Reuters) – China's leading private rocket firm LandSpace has completed the so-called "tutoring" process for a potential initial public offering, a filing with the country's securities regulator showed on Tuesday, as Beijing looks to boost the domestic space industry by faciliating access to its capital markets. The process involves an investment bank, in this case state-owned China International Capital Corp (CICC), coaching company executives on IPO-related issues. With the tutoring process complete, Beijing-based LandSpace has cleared an important procedural step in its planned 2026 listing on Shanghai's technology-focused STAR Market. LandSpace is likely to list in a segment of the STAR Market China's securities regulator created in June to host companies that are not yet profitable but involved in frontier technologies, "major technology breakthroughs, bright commercial prospects and heavy investment in research and development". LandSpace's long-term commercial prospects rest on its ability to become China's answer to U.S. aerospace giant SpaceX. SpaceX has held a near-monopoly on reusable rockets, a crucial cost-saving technology that has allowed it to populate Earth's outer reaches with its Starlink satellites. The IPO preparation comes amid a growing recognition by the Chinese government that its domestic space industry, once entirely dominated by decades-old state-owned conglomerates, needs private players with access to the country's capital markets if it hopes to catch up to SpaceX. Earlier this month, Beijing-based LandSpace became the first Chinese entity to conduct a full reusable rocket test by launching Zhuque-3, putting SpaceX and its billionaire owner Elon Musk on alert. But the test failed to prove reusability as Zhuque-3's booster crashed rather than completing a controlled landing, meaning it could not be recovered and launched again, as with SpaceX's Falcon 9. Other Chinese space firms, both state-owned and private, are now racing to gain first-mover advantage by testing their own reusable rockets. In the company's only interview since the launch, Zhuque-3's chief designer Dai Zheng told state broadcaster CCTV that SpaceX's success was tied to its ability to continuously withstand the huge financial losses incurred by test flights, and only by going public could domestic competitors like LandSpace amass enough funds to subsidize a similar speed of product iteration. "To some extent, I think our country has also recognized this," Dai said. SpaceX announced internally that it was preparing for an IPO in 2026 earlier this month. Several of LandSpace's domestic competitors, like Galactic Energy, have also begun the tutoring process for a potential IPO in China, state-owned Securities Daily reported last month. Since its founding in 2015, LandSpace has conducted multiple rounds of fund-raising totalling around half a billion dollars, according to Chinese corporate records. (Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )
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