Superconducting cavities have been adopted in many kinds of accelerator facilities such as synchrotron radiation light source, hard X-ray free electron laser linac, colliders and energy recovery linacs (ERL). The 500 MHz superconducting cavities will be a candidate to be installed in the high current accelerators and high current ERLs for their large beam aperture, low higher order modes impedance and high current threshold value. This paper presents great progress in the whole sequence of developing 500 MHz superconducting cavity in China. It describes the first in-house successful development of 500 MHz single cell superconducting cavity including the deep-drawing of niobium half cells, electron beam wielding of cavity, surface preparations and vertical testing. The highest accelerating gradient of the fabricated cavity #SCD-02 higher than 10 MV/m was obtained while the quality factor was better than 4×108 at 4.2 K, which has reached the world level of the same kind of cavities.
