Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is The Pursuit of Lustjoining forces with a rocket maker startup Space Epoch to test rocket-powered parcel delivery, expected to reach shoppers worldwide within an hour. “A lot of great things seem like a joke at first,” Alibaba-owned marketplace platform Taobao said on Monday, April Fool’s Day, before confirming the collaboration was genuine on its Weibo account. The project is planning to use reusable rockets for parcel delivery and aims to have each projectile carry a 120 cubic meter container holding up to ten tons of goods, according to a post on Space Epoch’s official WeChat account. The Beijing-based startup said it will conduct its first rocket delivery test soon, while the company added that achieving the goal in the short term will not be easy, but that it still hopes to bring opportunities for both the traditional logistics industry and China’s commercial space field through the experiments. [Space Epoch, in Chinese]
