Breadth Paired with Depth in China's Space Sector
Plus a delegation from a lesser-known Emirate visits ADA Space 🇦🇪, a lot of activity in optical comms 💡, and a space forum between Hainan and Hong Kong 🇭🇰
Dear Readers,
Happy Sunday, and welcome to the whole bunch of new subs that signed up since my last piece. As you’ll see, all content is free for 90 days after publication, after which time it goes behind a paywall. If you like what you’re reading, consider a paid subscription or sharing with a friend. Cutting to the chase:
Quite a lot going on since mid-May, including lots of rumblings from the laser comms sector, a delegation from Ajman visiting ADA Space, and a love-fest between Hainan and Hong Kong. But first, a look at the impressive diversity of missions that have launched from China in just the past few weeks, and what that tells us about China’s space program more broadly.
Breadth Paired with Depth
Anyone who was kind enough to watch my testimony in front of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission back in April would have seen that one of my key points was China’s space industry has impressive breadth and a very deep bench. This is in contrast to the US space industry today, in which the vast majority of rockets and satellites being launched are coming from one mega-company with an impressive degree of vertical integration.
China’s space industry has hundreds of startups, state-owned subsidiaries, and research laboratories. And while none of them have the same impact as SpaceX/Starlink on the global space sector, when working together, they are proving to be an impressive force in getting projects done. The past few weeks have been a shining example of the industrial base coming together to do just that.
The Past Few Weeks
From 14 May until yesterday, we saw 37 spacecraft launched from China on 8 different types of rockets (plus one demo flight on another rocket). The 8 rockets were provided by 5 different companies (6 if we cont the demo flight), and the 37 spacecraft were built by >10 manufacturers. In short, a plethora of activity in just a few week span.
In addition to the breadth of the manufacturers involved in these 9 missions, the missions themselves represented an impressive variety of applications, showcasing the extent to which China is placing a wide variety of bets on space industry activities.
Let’s dig in:
Three-Body Computing Constellation: A Marriage of Company and Provincial Lab
The first launch in these few weeks was also the one with the most satellites, when on 14 May, twelve satellites from the Three Body Computing constellation were launched on a LM-2D. These 12 are the first of an envisioned 2,800-satellite constellation aiming to provide computing power in space. Why computing power in space? In the short-term, for things like more efficient processing and downlinking of earth observation data, but in the longer-term, for things like space exploration, whereby an envisaged laser communications network could be used to send data from, for example, the Moon and low-earth orbit, with data being processed “locally” from LEO.
The prime manufacturer, ADA Space, is a nominally commercial company with finite resources, but the project is also being spearheaded by the Zhejiang Lab, a research center being run by the Government of Zhejiang Province (population 65M, GDP $1.2T), Zhejiang University, and Alibaba. We are still far from a 2,800 satellite constellation, but the backing of Zhejiang Lab makes this project quite substantial.
In the days following the launch, we saw dozens of supplier data points emerge for the Three Body satellites, with many of the suppliers also being commercial companies. HiStarlink provided laser comms terminals, Soonion provided a variety of navigation and payload products, and Emposat (among others) provided TT&C services. Soon after the launch, we also saw a launch tender from ADA Space related to the second batch of satellites, which are expected to be launched later this year.
Commercial Launchers Taking Center Stage
Three of China’s leading commercial launch companies had a successful launch in the past few weeks, with a fourth achieving an impressive controlled landing of a rocket into the sea.
Galactic Energy gets the first nod with their 19th successful launch in 20 attempts taking place on 19 May. Founded just ~7 years ago, the company is now launching almost once per month, with this their 4th launch of 2025, having completed 5 in 2024 and 6 in 2023. They’ve now sent 81 satellites to orbit successfully on their Ceres-1 rocket, and plan to start testing their Pallas-1 later this year.
Landspace’s Zhuque-2E (Enhanced) sent 6 Spacety satellites into orbit on 17 May. While not as prolific as the Ceres-1, the ZQ-2E is technologically more impressive, as the world’s first liquid methalox rocket to send satellites to orbit, and with a larger payload mass (4 tons to LEO SSO). This was the second launch of the ZQ-2E, coming ~6 months after the inaugural launch. According to the Government of Huzhou, the rocket leveraged Landspace’s broad industrial base, with the engines being built in-house in Huzhou, and the rocket being integrated at Landspace’s site in Jiaxing.
Not to be outdone, a couple of days later, CAS Space launched their ZK-1A rocket with 6 satellites built by a variety of customers. This was CAS Space’s first launch of 2025, and their first successful launch since their December 2024 launch failure. The company is now 6/7 on launching their ZK-1A, and have already established impressive credibility with multiple satellite launches, sending 26 satellites into orbit on its second launch back in 2023.
And finally, relatively unknown launch startup Space Epoch completed a flight test of the Yuanxingzhe-1 rocket, reaching an altitude of 2.5km during a 125 second flight before coming in for a soft controlled landing in the East China Sea. According to Jiuzhou Yunjian, who manufactured the engines, the test completed 8 important tasks, including ignition takeoff, full thrust climb, variable thrust adjustment, engine shutdown, free descent glide, engine secondary restart, deceleration to hover over the sea surface, and soft landing on the sea surface.
So within a few weeks of one another, we had 4 commercial launch companies reach impressive milestones. None as impressive as SpaceX and their near-daily launch cadence now, but nonetheless an impressive breadth of industrial talent on display. And yet, there was still more going on in these few weeks, with three state-run missions deserving a spot on the highlight reel.
The SatNet Launch: Introducing Competition to the Guowang Sweepstakes
The launch of 5 “Satellite Internet Low-Earth Orbit Satellite, Group 4” satellites was an intriguing development for China’s state-owned version of Starlink, China SatNet. While the previous 3 groups of satellites (totaling 29) had all been built by CAST, these 5 were built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites (SECM), a state-owned entity that is also one of two prime manufacturers for the Thousand Sails constellation.
SECM has proven a competent manufacturer for state-run missions before, building batches of BeiDou and Yaogan satellites in the past, but this is their first time being linked with the SatNet/Guowang constellation. And Guowang has, if nothing else, moved at a fairly glacial pace in the 4 years since its establishment, possibly due in part to lack of real competition among its manufacturing base (being so fully state-run, most of the contracts would by definition go to CAST).
Bringing SECM into the mix as a supplier may change this, and this change is only possible because there are so many competent satellite manufacturers in China. In a state-dominated system with capitalist tendencies, having market competition within a contained project like this has proven immensely successful in the past. For SatNet, having another option for manufacturing may be a catalyst that lets them accelerate the deployment of Guowang. Something to keep an eye on.
Shijian-26: A Wild Card Group of Manufacturers
An under-the-radar launch, the Shijian-26 remote sensing satellite was launched as a single payload on a LM-4B on 29 May. The Shijian series of satellites have been launched for more than a decade (Shijian literally meaning “practice”, typically used for new technology satellites), but one thing has always been consistent: they’ve almost always been built by CAST or SAST.
This one was different, with the satellite apparently built by a consortium of CAST, the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), and the CAS Changchun Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (CIOPM). This is far from the first space mission by HIT and CIOPM, but their involvement seems to indicate their moving up in the world to be a part of more important missions. And when parsing supplier info, we found data points that indicate an even more diverse group of players providing things like the optical payload, indicating a wide net being cast to find suppliers for this one satellite.
Granted, one satellite does not make a trend, but it is noteworthy that the Shijian series has been opened up to, you guessed it, a broader variety of players.
Tianwen-2: A diverse variety of widgets to bring back asteroid samples
Tianwen-2 was launched just after midnight on 29 May (China time), with plans to visit the 469219 Kamo’oalewa asteroid in 2027, bring samples back to earth with a return capsule, then continue onward towards a main-belt comet (311P/PANSTARRS) and explore it with a variety of instruments. And what a variety of instruments.
In the days following the launch, we tracked down suppliers of 65 separate parts and systems on the spacecraft, with companies and institutes coming from CETC, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Norinco, HIT, CASC, and a bunch of universities. In short, this was a broad effort with much of China’s space industrial base taking part.
In addition to taking some of the pressure off of CASC to do everything, this mission will also give many Chinese entities experience in deep space exploration missions, allowing them to gather data on the performance of their widgets, allowing systems integrators to understand how widgets perform when paired with other widgets, and giving a whole bunch of engineers experience in a national mission.
What Does All This Mean?
I always say that if we compare the most impressive commercial launch company in the west with the most impressive in China, the west is far ahead. And if we compare #2 in both places, probably the same. But if we compared #5 in the west with #5 in China, it gets closer. And #10, China is undeniably in the lead. And #20, probably the same. And #30….you get the idea. The same applies for satellites, laser communication terminals, thrusters, and the rest of the supply chain.
In the end, this might not matter: it could be that space is such a “winner-take-all” affair that having the very best company in the field is the most important deciding factor in having a sustainable space ecosystem.
But there is something to be said about hundreds of companies, and tens of thousands of engineers tinkering, getting flight experience for their widgets, and working together on big, beautiful missions (see what I did there?). And this is especially true as we are all trying to figure out “what does a commercial space ecosystem actually look like?” It could be that the only mass-market way to earn money using space in the 21st century is satellite internet, and if that’s the case, then Starlink is clearly head and shoulders ahead of everyone else.
If, however, there are other ways out there waiting to be discovered, China, with its scattershot approach of lots of tinkerers getting lots of support from lots of governments, might just be onto something.
Time will tell, but in the meantime, it helps to take a step back and admire the objectively impressive orchestra of commercial, government, and academic players coming together to put on a heck of a show over these past few weeks.
And in other news this month
CTO of newish commercial launch company Astronstone (established May 2024) was interviewed, where he discussed the company’s technology strategy (stainless steel reusable rockets and chopsticks to catch them). During the interview, CTO Tian Jichao noted “although Astronstone started late, it avoided a lot of costs of failure”.
The company was, for example, established after it was clear that there would be substantial demand for commercial rockets by China’s several large NGSO comms constellations. The interview came just a few weeks after the company announced an “Angel+” funding round, which, when combined with their Angel round from a couple of months earlier, reached >¥100M (~US$13M) of funding.
Laser Link raised a B-round of “tens of millions of Yuan”, with funding coming from Xiyang Capital and the Runyang Optoelectronics Industry Fund. Founded in 2021, Laser Link is one of ~15 companies in China developing laser communications terminals, with the company already seeing its 4th-gen terminal launched on multiple satellites earlier this year.
Another of China’s laser comms startups, Laser Starcom, announced that they had completed 116 consecutive hours of inter-satellite link tests between the Laser Starcom-01 and -02 satellites, launched ~1 year ago. The testing took place from 14-19 May 2025, reaching speeds of up to 10 Gbps. The company later announced that the Laser Starcom-03 and -04 satellites are under construction, with plans to be launched in Q4 2025. The announcement came a couple of weeks after Laser Starcom announced an “A++” round of more than ¥100M, which is planned to be used for “large-scale production capacity improvement”.
In an example of the plethora of capable satellite manufacturers in China, a tender for 10 remote sensing satellites from the Meishan District Government was won by MinoSpace with a bid of ¥804M, beating out Shenzhen Dongfanghong (¥820M), Space-One (¥815M), and the somewhat less experienced Magic Cube’s lower bid of ¥786M. MinoSpace will build 4 optical and 6 SAR satellites for Meishan, this coming a couple of years after the district invested into CGSTL’s Jilin-1 constellation. In addition to the satellites, Meishan is planning “the largest satellite measurement, operation, and control center in Sichuan Province”, with a rendering shown below.
A forum on space collaboration was held between Hainan and Hong Kong. The island province has several key ingredients for a space industry, namely a big launch site and nearby satellite and rocket factories. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is a dense megacity with limited industry, but with deep financial markets and world-class universities. Deputy Chief Secretary of HK Cheuk Wing-Hing attended the event, where he noted that Hong Kong will “simplify the application process for low-orbit satellite licenses within 2025 to attract investment and talents to Hong Kong as a base to develop low-orbit satellite business”.
A delegation from the UAE visited ADA Space on 27 May, where they “welcomed ADA Space to provide technical and product support for the UAE’s developing space industry, especially in the field of space computing”. This came just a week after the above-mentioned Three Body Computing Constellation launch. Details are murky, and the name of the UAE delegation leader was only transliterated into Chinese, but appears to have been Marwan Al Shaali of the Ajman Chamber of Commerce, representing the Emirate of Ajman, the smallest in the UAE in terms of area.
And finally, a reasonably interesting piece on the DFH-5 GEO satellite bus, China’s largest. First launched in late 2019 as the Shijian-20 satellite, the DFH-5 weighs between 6.5-9 tons with total satellite power of 10-30kW and capabilities of supporting up to 14 antennas and more than 120 transponders. The article delves into the different applications that the bus can be used for, including communications (up to 1 Tbps of capacity), remote sensing, and on-orbit servicing.
That’s all folks. As always, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, see you in a couple of weeks!
Best,
Blaine
I probably need to pay closer attention to the Chinese space launch industry. Very interesting that it's so, for lack of a better term, fragmented, even compared with the US.
This leads to some great questions as to why this happens in so many industries in China. This isn’t judgment, good or bad, but China seems unique in always having such intense, cutthroat competition in industrial sectors.
The US auto industry in 1910, for example, began with dozens of startups vying for the market, which consolidated into half a dozen companies ~25 years later.
China’s auto industry had a similar startup moment around the year 2000, yet 25 years later, it has not consolidated. For every company that failed or got bought out, another startup took its place.
Why does this happen? Certainly, this intense competition is leading to more rapid innovation that otherwise might occur and drives down prices more rapidly. Once Chinese launch companies crack reuse, China could quickly dominate space access.
Fascinating stuff as always. Thanks!!