Biweekly Brain Droppings: SpaceSail Goes Sailing
Plus Shanghai Space Industrial Base 🏭, more laser tests 🔦 and a Pakistani remote sensing satellite 🇵🇰
Dear Readers,
Happy weekend, and welcome to our second freemium Biweekly Brain Droppings. The first half of the month saw a bit of a lull leading up to the Lunar New Year, for which the holiday in China begins next week. That said, digging into the updates:
SpaceSail Opens the Year with a Bang
We spoke a lot last year about SpaceSail, the operator of the Thousand Sails (formerly G60) constellation, and for good reason: they launched 54 satellites from August onward, and made important overseas progress in Brazil among other markets.
In 2025, they’ve been in the headlines rather a lot. Most significant was in the first few days of the year, when the company announced that they had connected a cruise ship to the Thousand Sails constellation using a slick-looking antenna.
A bit to unpack here:
The tests were conducted in Hong Kong 🇭🇰, and the company upped their marketing game with the sexy HK skyline in the background. Why Hong Kong? Because SpaceSail does not have market access in Mainland China. The article was very specific in noting that the connection occurred as soon as the ship had entered Hong Kong waters
The tests were conducted with China Mobile Hong Kong as a partner. China Mobile is, of course, the massive state-owned telco. It should be considered a good sign for SpaceSail that they, as a nominally commercial company, are working with such heavyweights.
The ship outfitted with the terminal, known as the Gulangyu, also does voyages to Northeast and Southeast Asia (e.g. Shanghai to Jeju), which could mean that SpaceSail starts connecting ships in international waters.
Just a few days later, SpaceSail made another Hong Kong-related announcement, this time using their terminals and satellites to connect remote farms in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Having spent 12 years of my life straddling the Hong Kong/Shenzhen border, I’m very skeptical of a substantial market existing for such connectivity, but credit to SpaceSail for trying.
Not long after, we saw an announcement from CETC 54th Institute (CETC Network Communications Research Institute) about the first Thousand Sails gateways being shipped overseas. According to 54th, they tested four 1.8m Q/V-band antennas in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, before sending them overseas to Malaysia 🇲🇾
And finally, to round out a busy few weeks, SpaceSail was mentioned in the Islamabad Post (H/T to the man Richard H.) alongside Starlink and OneWeb as constellations that have applied for market access to Pakistan 🇵🇰
What to take away from all of this? For starters, SpaceSail is moving very quickly 1) into different downstream verticals such as maritime, and 2) into different international markets such as Malaysia and Pakistan. Following some orbit-raising issues on their 2nd batch of satellites, we may expect to see a temporary slowdown in launch cadence, but I would not expect that to last.
Shanghai Industrial Base Continues to Grow
Over at parent entity Orbital Gateway Consulting, we are hard at work on our China Space Industrial Bases Report, to be published later in Q1. As part of this research, we are digging into how many satellites are built in each city/industrial base per year, and the numbers for Shanghai are particularly a doozy, shown below.
The obvious trend is that 2024 saw a lot more satellites built in Shanghai than any year prior. The less obvious trend is the diversification fo manufacturers. For most of the past decade, satellites built in Shanghai came from either CASC subsidiary Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), or from CAS spinoff Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites (SECM). But the past few years, we’ve seen three new players ramp up capacity in Genesat, SASTSpace, and ASES Shanghai. Of course, this is still the Chinese space sector, so SASTSpace is just a commercial subsidiary of SAST, and Genesat is ~50% owned by SECM.
Be on the lookout for more info from the Industrial Base Report in the coming weeks, it will be the most comprehensive report available on China’s space industrial base.
And now a news roundup to round out the Droppings: