A Year of Successes Ends with Setbacks
Plus Guowang finally makes its debut 🛰️ A very merry Christmas for Landspace 🎄 🚀, and a laser comms test from CGSTL
Dear Readers,
Happy Holidays, and best wishes for 2025. Thanks for reading during this year, and a special thanks to paid subs, commenters, and anyone who has shared this Substack with a friend or colleague. Here’s to more adventures next year.
This is not a hit piece, but rather an observation that as China’s space sector gets bigger, there will be proportionally big challenges, and we should think about what those will look like. It just so happens that December saw one good example of each.
The setback in launch demonstrates that even though China’s commercial launchers have started launching once per month, their reliability still has some room for improvement. The setback on orbit shows that China’s new manufacturers, launching dozens of satellites, will have some growing pains. And the setback in business shows that China’s commercial space companies may face some of the same overcapacity issues that other industries have faced.
Setbacks in Launch
China’s commercial launch companies have had a heck of a few years. Since the beginning of 2020, commercial companies (everyone other than CALT, SAST, and China Rocket) have successfully launched 48 rockets, carrying 177 spacecraft into orbit. The past two years have accounted for the lion’s share with nearly 70% of the launch total (32 launches) and 80% of the satellites (142), as Expace and Galactic Energy in particular have begun to ramp up launch cadence. Moving forward, these companies, along with a plethora of others, will debut a series of new and unfamiliar launchers.
As these launchers ramp up, a couple of setbacks, including one from just a few days ago, provide some food for thought and highlight some of the growing pains of a rapidly-expanding sector.
Most recently, the 29 December failure of the ZK-1A from CAS Space was a reminder that China’s commercial launchers are not as reliable as the SOEs. By our count, since the start of 2020, the launch record for all Chinese launch companies is 281/295, or 95.3% reliability. Looking at rockets built by CALT, SAST, and China Rocket, the reliability goes up to 98.7% (with SAST getting a gold star in particular for having a 100% reliability rate since 2020). For rockets built by everyone else, largely new rockets, the success rate is a still decent 81% (47/58), and removing iSpace from the mix (2 successes in 7 attempts) brings this success rate to 88%.
In the case of CAS Space, after the 29 December anomaly the company is a still very respectable 5 of 6. They have an aggressive launch schedule for 2025, so we’ll soon see whether they can get back on track.
The other, more dramatic but less recent setback was the Space Pioneer Tianlong-3 first stage engine debacle from late June, whereby a static fire test went dynamic. The rocket engine stage came loose from a test bench, flying hundreds of meters into the sky, before exploding in a fireball on a mountainside within view of thousands of high-rise apartments (and their inhabitants’ cameras) in the city of Gongyi.
As I mentioned at the time, Space Pioneer is one of >20 commercial launch startups in China. Some of them are well-funded with cutting-edge technology, some are less well-funded with more shoestring technology, and all are moving very fast, and in some cases literally breaking things. This is not to say that all Chinese commercial space companies are reckless, nor that they are more reckless than western counterparts. Rather, China is a vast country and its space industry is moving very fast, and some companies will try to cut corners (to put a more positive spin, push the envelope) in the country’s far-flung places.
Since the accident Space Pioneer has, for their part, been pretty transparent. This included a deep-dive news report earlier this month that highlighted Space Pioneer’s industrial base around Zhangjiagang, Changshu, and Taicang City in the Yangtze River Delta, and an article about the upcoming first launch of the Tianlong-3, showcasing quite a few detailed slides.
The setbacks faced by China’s emerging commercial launch sector will, for better or worse, impact primarily Chinese entities. But for China’s multiple constellations with planned thousands of satellites, on-orbit issues can pose a bigger threat to the broader space community.
Setbacks in Orbit
A successful launch is not a guarantee of successful satellite deployment and operation. The past few weeks saw a particularly illustrative example of this in the Thousand Sails Constellation.
Thousand Sails (formerly G60) and its operator, SpaceSail, has come of out nowhere to take the lead in China’s NGSO constellation race, sending 3 batches of 18 satellites each to orbit in August, October, and December. Of the 54 satellites launched, however, quite a few have not successfully made it to orbit.
For starters, the entire 2nd batch of 18 satellites appears to be suffering from issues with orbit-raising. One Chinese-language source notes that “Group 02 satellites were not normal. Some of them never ignited. The ones that ignited stopped their orbital ascent at the end of November and stopped at different orbital altitudes”.
The same source noted that the second batch of 18 satellites appeared to have four types/issues:
Type 1 does not raise its orbit at all after reaching initial orbit. Satellites No 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, and 35
Type 2 started to ascend around 21-22 Nov, before stopping at end of Nov having gained 20-40km of altitude. Satellites No 19, 20, 23, 29, 31, and 36
Type 3 started to ascend around 21-22 Nov, but raised only 2-13km over the ensuing few days. Satellites No 21, 30, 23, and 33
Type 4 started to ascend around 25 Nov and ascending only 1-13km. Satellites No 22 and 24
The second batch was built by Genesat, whereas the first and third were built by SECM. Genesat is a new manufacturer founded in January 2022 (with substantial support and tech from CAS), while SECM is far more established, having been founded in the early 2000s (also with support from CAS), and has built batches of satellites for BeiDou and Yaogan constellations, among many others.
Without wanting to speculate too much, could the apparent thruster issue on the second batch of satellites have been avoided by a more experienced satellite integrator or thruster manufacturer?
China’s space sector has been growing at leaps and bounds for a decade, and the upstream suppliers have boomed even more recently. There are literally hundreds of companies building complex systems and components that are being launched into orbit at an astonishing rate. With Chinese commercial space companies renowned for moving fast, iterating, and using as many commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) items as possible, it can be no wonder when a specific part or system does not work.
As China launches more satellites, the risk of anomaly per satellite will likely fall, but overall risk may increase due to the rapid rise in number of satellites. A similar dynamic is true with Starlink and other western systems, and ultimately coordination is the most important thing in avoiding on-orbit accidents, but it should be noted that China has a particularly large number of particularly new companies launching stuff into orbit, and that might create some risks.
In the case of Thousand Sails, the orbit-raising anomaly appears to have delayed the launch of their next batch of satellites, planned onboard a LM-8 from Wenchang. On the whole, however, 2024 was a monumental year for SpaceSail, deploying large batches of NGSO comms satellites before the bigger, politically-favored China SatNet. Not only that, they made good progress on the commercial front, securing an MoU with Brazilian heavyweight Telebrás during a Xi-Lula summit. This is especially important given the CAPEX-heavy nature of the constellation, and such projects in general. Which takes us to the third type of setback experienced by Chinese commercial space companies in 2024: overcapacity.
Overcapacity: Building It Before They Come
Overcapacity is not an issue limited to the space sector, with Chinese sectors from steel to rail to electric vehicles having seen instances of overcapacity over the years. In the space domain, this may occur with rockets, laser terminals, thrusters, and other components. But already, it’s occurring with remote sensing data. Earlier this month, the planned ¥2.683B IPO by leading remote sensing company CGSTL was cancelled by the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
There were many reasons for the cancellation, but a big one was the fact that the company had spent a lot of money building and launching >140 satellites, an impressive feat, but did not see revenues ramp up as quickly. That is, they overbuilt. In other industries, overcapacity has led to aggressive foreign market entry, and for CGSTL we saw arguably similar, namely a $31M sale to Wagner Group that got the company sanctioned, and a likely sale to Nigeria.
Next year is unlikely to see a repeat of Wagner Group sales (though stranger things have happened, after all CGSTL wasn’t the first), but overcapacity leading to export, and complicated financial exits due to overbuilding are likely to continue.
Conclusions: What to Make of these Challenges?
This list is by no means comprehensive, nor are any of the challenges unique to China. But given the scale of the country’s economy and space program, we should be aware moving forward:
Chinese commercial launchers are reliable, but they will have growing pains that impact their customers
Commercial satellite manufacturers and their suppliers will have similar growing pains on-orbit, having broader impacts
And all commercial companies will face the intensely competitive Chinese economy, which will lead to overcapacity and make investment exits difficult.
And in other news this month
The first batch of 10 Guowang/SatNet satellites launched onboard a LM-5B from Wenchang. Oddly we still have not seen an official press release from China SatNet about the launch, nor have we seen a release from CASC saying “these are Guowang satellites”, with the company rather referring to “Satellite Internet Low Orbit Satellite Group 1” (卫星互联网低轨01组卫星). Chinese media has nonetheless labeled the satellites as SatNet/Guowang, so we assume the same, especially given that none of the other suspected SatNet satellites launched in 2023/2024 are attributable (also called “low orbit test satellite-XX”). More to come from this space in 2025.
Landspace had a very merry Christmas, with a 25 December piece from the 21st Century Business Herald reporting a ¥900M funding round for the company, with money coming from China’s National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrading Fund. The funding will go towards further development and testing of their ZQ-2 and ZQ-3 rockets.
CGSTL completed a 100 Gbps laser comms test using a vehicle-mounted antenna on earth, and the Jilin-1 02A02 satellite on-orbit. For CGSTL, this will be important for downlinking huge amounts of remote sensing data being generated by their Jilin-1 constellation of ~140 satellites.
Guodian Gaoke saw 4 more of its Tianqi (Apocalypse) satellites launch onboard a Ceres-1 on 19 December. With 33 of a planned 38-satellite first-phase now on-orbit, Guodian Gaoke has begun rolling out user terminals and other equipment, which they profiled in a piece published after the launch.
Laser Link raised yet more money in a B2 round, which was effectively an extension of their B and B1 rounds earlier this year. Funding came from Guangzhou government-linked, but publicly-traded Haige Communications, a company that has long specialized in maritime and military communications systems, satellite navigation products, and specialty electronic/comms equipment, making this a possible strategic investment into laser comms. Earlier in the month, Laser Link published a very detailed piece about their product range.
In observance of the 5-year anniversary of the launch of the Shijian-20 satellite, we saw a deep-dive article into the DFH-5 satellite bus, China’s largest, and of which SJ-20 was the first. This beast of a satellite has a launch mass of 8-9t, and a payload mass of up to 1.8t, which in the case of Shijian-20 was a Q/V-band payload with a modest 10 Gbps of throughput.
Shijian-20, based on the DFH-5 satellite platform A couple of helpful 2024 summary and 2025 outlook pieces from rising star of Chinese space industry news and analysis, Small Space Ant, including one about commercial launch, and another on reusable launch specifically.
And with that, we have ourselves a 2024 in the books. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and be on the lookout for the 2024 China Space Industry Year in Review piece, to be published in the coming week or so.
See You in 2025,
Blaine