Biweekly Brain Droppings
Plus the race for China's Starlink intensifies, VLEO SAR, and CGSTL cancels their IPO
Dear Readers,
Happy December, and for those in cold weather climates, I’m with you from (very slightly) snowy Toron(t)o, Ontario, Canada ❄️ 🇨🇦 Quite a first week of the month, but first, a few short admin updates:
Weekly is too much. Too much for me, probably also too much for you. Starting next week, the China Space Monitor will have biweekly emails with partial paywall every ~15th of the month, and the regular monthly feature article + news for all subscribers at the end of the month. This will allow me to maintain a high quality monthly email for everyone, while also providing a bit of additional content for paid subscribers.
With that said, this week saw the third launch of the Thousand Sails constellation, bringing SpaceSail’s on-orbit fleet to 54 satellites. The below chart is obviously looking at a narrow dimension, and not all constellations are attempting the same development path, but its undeniable that Thousand Sails has set sail quickly. And, for what it’s worth, the satellites SpaceSail is launching appear to be biggish: ~300kg each.
Not to be outdone, CAST announced that their production line in Tianjin had reached a capacity of 100 satellites per year, that they’ve built 30 satellites there this year, and that they’re making progress in Hainan. This is suspicious timing relative to the bunch of CAST crates that showed up in Hainan last week, and seems to indicate that CAST is ready to show off their SatNet batch manufacturing credentials. I’ve been hurt by SatNet before, but this maybe, just might be the start of Guowang batch launches.
The AirSat-08 SAR satellite was launched into VLEO on 4 December as part of the AirSat constellation, a project being supported by the Shandong Provincial Government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The satellite had quite a few interesting systems including some next-generation thrusters and reaction wheels from a commercial suppliers.
Images from the SuperView NEO 2-03 and 2-04 satellites, launched last month to be operated by China SpaceView Technology (aka Siwei), began to trickle out. This included Digital Surface Model (DSM) images, such as the image of Albacete, Spain below 🇪🇸
And finally, commercial suborbital and orbital spacecraft company Interstellar announced a ¥30M (~US$4.25M) Angel funding round, with plans to build the Crosser-1 suborbital crewed spacecraft (CYZ1).
Around the same time, CGSTL’s long-delayed IPO was cancelled by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, with the company seemingly mired in some shareholder issues while also spending a lot, lot of money on EO satellites.
And with that, what a week. Until next week, stay well!
Blaine
Thanks, as always.