Bonus Post: 2024 First Half Roundup in China Space
Constellations, Rockets, and A Whole Lot More from 2024 🚀 🛰️
Dear Readers,
Happy 4th of July weekend, and welcome to an impromptu special post. It’s been a great 18 months of the China Space Monitor, and ~6 months of opening the newsletter to paid subscribers. To now, paid subs have received my eternal thanks, as well as access to older posts. Moving forward, I plan to start doing ~2 additional posts per year for paid subs, and in the medium-term expanding this to more content TBD. Our monthly issues will always remain free.
In the meantime, a pause for a big thanks to everyone that’s subscribed to now, and a special thanks to our paid subscribers. As a thank you to everyone, the first ~1/3 of the newsletter is public, and as a special thanks to our paid subs, the remaining ~2/3. Happy reading, and thank you all for your kind support!
Launch Highlights
H1 2024 saw 29 successful launches by Chinese companies (30 attempts), sending 88 spacecraft into orbit. Compared to H1 2023 we are ahead in terms of launches (25 last year), but are behind in terms of satellites (121 last year, with CGSTL launching 41 on a single rocket). This year’s launches were conducted by a variety of launch companies including the obvious CALT/SAST, and less obvious Expace, Orienspace, Galactic Energy (x3), CAS Space, and China Rocket. The next few years should see several of these companies go from 1-2 launches per year to 6-10 launches per year.
On the satellites launched side, 2024 is a bit behind 2023, but this year has arguably seen a better variety of high-quality firms launching initial batches of satellites. More on this below, but in general we saw a handful of companies launch initial sets of 5-10 satellites, with expectations for quite a few more in the second half of the year. Last year saw strong growth compared to 2022, but was rather focused on CGSTL, who launched 49 satellites including 41 on a single LM-2D in June 2023. Digressing, H1 2024 saw a wider variety of companies launching batches.
Some of the bigger launches in H1 included:
A batch of 11 satellites from GeeSpace in February, bringing the company’s on-orbit total to 20. Operationally the company plans to have 72 satellites on-orbit by EOY 2025, and commercially they announced progress in Oman via local partner Azyan Telecom, while integrating Geely cars with Tiantong as a first step towards eventual integration of GeeSpace constellation and Geely cars.
A quartet of 4 Beijing-3 series high-resolution remote sensing satellites, launched in May for 21AT and representing some of the most sophisticated commercial remote sensing satellites deployed by China
3 successful launches by Galactic Energy inside of ~2 weeks, with the company sending 13 satellites to orbit. As a reminder, Galactic Energy has set themselves apart from all other commercial Chinese launchers (with the possible exception of Expace), having successfully launched 13 rockets out of 14 attempts, this despite having been founded in 2018. These 13 successes include launches from Jiuquan and the Haiyang Oriental Sea Launch site off the coast of Shandong Province.
PakSat-MM1 was the first foreign GEO commsat successfully launched by China since all the way back in 2017 when Alcomsat was sent to orbit for Algeria 🇩🇿 The interim years did see a failed launch of an Indonesian satellite, however. In any case, a congrats to Pakistan for launching their first high throughput satellite, and to China for getting back into the GEO comms export game.
The Tianmu constellation launched 4 more satellites early in the year, this following the 18 satellites that they launched in late 2023. Funded by CASIC, the meteorology constellation should have some runway for development.
And finally a shoutout to a few satellites each that were launched as part of the Tianqi, Xingshidai, Tianmu, Yunyao, and Weihai constellations, as well as a few laser comms players that launched their latest generations of payloads.
Overall the half-year was consistent with 2023 in terms of launch activity. Funding dynamics would suggest that we should see a big bump in activity moving forward.
Funding Snapshot