Ten years ago, Dai Zheng made a career-defining gamble: he left his secure, prestigious engineering post in China’s state space programme to join an unproven private start-up. On August 19, that risk paid off when a rocket booster returned from orbit and landed upright for the first time in Chinese commercial space history.For Dai, now chief commander of the Zhuque-3 missions at LandSpace, the successful touchdown marked both a major personal milestone and a critical leap forward in China’s...