China's International Space Efforts
Plus another Thousand Sails launch 🛰️ More satellite direct-to-device news 📱 and BYD getting involved in astronaut transit 🧑🏻🚀
Dear Readers,
Happy Thursday, and Happy Halloween to those who celebrate 🎃 For those attending the APSCC conference or the Thailand Space Week expo in Bangkok next week, give me a shout, it would be great to meet up.
Launches remained elevated this month, with 30 satellites launched including G60 (more below), a batch of Yaogan satellites, three Tianping satellites, and the Shenzhou-19 crewed launch at the very tail end of the month. The past 3 months have seen 102 satellites launched from China. But before getting into some monthly news updates, a deep-dive into the outward march of China’s commercial space sector.
Stepping out into the world: China’s commercial space goes abroad
China’s commercial space companies have nominally been open for international business for some time, and this has led to some real collaboration, perhaps counterintuitively, in the early years of Chinese commercial space. Among other projects, French propulsion manufacturer ThrustMe sent two payloads to orbit on Spacety satellites in 2019 and 2020, signalling a type of collaboration whereby a European company wanted to develop a novel technology, and a Chinese company provided fast and flexible access to orbit.
Geopolitics and other big-picture issues have complicated this type of collaboration in the years since then, and some companies (most notably Spacety, and also CGSTL) have been hit with sanctions. On the Chinese side, it has never been entirely clear what is and is not allowed for commercial space companies, but some plausible businesses (launching a Chinese rocket from a foreign launch site) have forever been unquestionably a no-go.
At the same time, major Chinese government projects such as Guowang and G60 have become the biggest prize for most companies, and the path to winning these projects is not entirely clear. Just as Starlink might take pause in working with a western supplier that does lots of business in China, might China’s powers that be view with suspicion Chinese suppliers that do a lot of business abroad?
It creates a complicated calculus for Chinese commercial companies. They face a theoretically massive but deeply uncertain internal market, and a more developed but highly complicated global market. During this month, I attended a number of conferences including IAC, where I got the chance to speak with Chinese commercial space companies about this calculus.
Scrappy But Effective
The 2024 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) was a massive event, attended by more than 11,000 delegates from more than 120 countries. Among them were dozens of Chinese companies which, broadly speaking, could be split into two groups. 1) Companies/entities displaying at the CASC booth, and 2) Companies/entities displaying at their own booth or others’ booths.
The massive CASC booth included sub-sections for major CASC subsidiaries (e.g. SAST), the Chinese Society of Astronautics, as well as posters or other materials from commercial entities including Everlight Technology and Emposat. Around a dozen companies had their own booths, including a cluster of manufacturers such as MinoSpace, Magic Cube, AZSpace, and CAS Space, as well as a few standalone companies like TY Space and EDrive Space.
With the caveat that these insights come from a handful of conversations with Chinese and non-Chinese space companies at IAC, there were a few major takeaways:
China is very much open to engagement with the international space community, but on their own terms. CASC and the powers that be in China had a massive booth that exuded the justifiable confidence of a great space power. However, while the NASA, ESA, and JAXA booths hosted a variety of international talks and panels, the CASC booth did not, with most official engagement appearing to happen on the sidelines rather than in the public eye. With that said, at a government level China’s desire for international engagement on its own terms is very clear. About a month before IAC, a number of Chinese government laboratories and organizations (e.g. Deep Space Exploration Lab, Chinese Society of Astronautics, CGWIC) hosted Second Annual Deep Space Exploration Conference, which saw a keynote shown at least partly in English with the theme “ILRS Embracing the World”.
Chinese commercial companies are scrappy but effective. A few examples of this include multiple companies sharing booths, companies giving out the business cards of related companies, and my personal favorite, a company “Central Star Dynamic Control”. What is Central Star Dynamic Control? I didn’t know either, so I went to investigate their booth, which was exhibiting hall effect thrusters. I explained to the person from Central Star Dynamic Control that I’d never heard of them, and that their website doesn’t work, and their name wasn’t showing up on WeChat (it still does not). The representative explained to me that they’re a new company building thrusters, and I should expect a website soon. Fair enough (and, to her credit, their site does work now). A couple of days later, on the WeChat official account of a completely different company that also makes thrusters showed an interesting photo of the Central Star Dynamic Control booth…. but with the logo blurred out! It’s not immediately clear what was going on, but the second company that posted the blurred on WeChat is far more prominent and well-established, and had been showing similar literature to our friends at Central Star Dynamic for some time. In any case, an example of the scrappiness and to some extent opaqueness of Chinese commercial space companies.
That all being the case, the international space community views the Chinese space sector with interest, curiosity, and in some cases, concern. When speaking with non-US western commercial space companies at IAC on the topic of China, quite a few expressed a desire to better understand sourcing opportunities from the Chinese space supply chain, at least for non-sensitive parts. Others were expressing a keen interest in coordination with Chinese constellations. And a fair number of companies were making it very clear that China is a no-go zone for them, due largely to business with US and other western governments.
Other highlights from the Chinese contingent at IAC 2024 included display of Chang’e-6 lunar samples while announcing second batch of research opportunities for the Chang’e-5 samples, and the Thousand Sails (G60) launch occurring during the week. Overall, the buzz around Chinese companies at IAC 2024 was pretty positive: Chinese commercial companies were open for business, and a fair percentage of the conference attendees were open to having conversations.
Other Musings on Chinese Space Firms Overseas
Throughout the month the analogy of electric cars became more and more apparent. Traveling through Italy for IAC, then Thailand for APSCC, I came across an impressive number of BYD cars, something I am all too familiar with having spent 6 years living in BYD’s home city of Shenzhen. These BYDs are in part a byproduct of oversupply in China, with oversupply a byproduct of an overly stimulative government towards certain key industries and certain key times, e.g. electric vehicles 7-10 years ago, and to a certain extent still today. The result is a BYD store in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, and a BYD factory here in Thailand.
This glut that we see in Chinese-made electric vehicles (and underlying government stimulus) could conceivably happen/are happening in the space sector as well. While space is obviously more sensitive, there is fair precedent to think that a Chinese satellite factory in Southeast Asia or the Middle East is possible—heck, we’ve already seen one built in Egypt. There is an upcoming Thailand Space Week here in the Land of Smiles, and unsurprisingly, CASC, MinoSpace, Galaxy Space, and Star Vision are all sponsoring the event (it should be said, alongside the Japanese Cabinet Office, JAXA, and other foreign sponsors). In the constantly-evolving space sector of the Global South, China is emerging as a major player at an important time.
What to Expect Moving Forward?
China remains largely a mystery even to neighboring countries. We should expect to see more pioneering commercial space companies from South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere start to travel to China on supplier missions. As the space sector becomes more commercialized, and as parts of it become less sensitive and more commoditized, we should expect to see the barriers for sourcing start to decline, i.e. companies will be able to source more things from more places with less red tape.
This could mean that China emerges as a low-cost supplier of non-sensitive components and systems, potentially allowing commercial space companies in other countries to do more, with less. It could alternatively be that all of space remains highly sensitive, and that blocs of countries emerge with one side being prohibited from buying Chinese components for all but the most trivial things, and the other side being largely more open to China but, implicitly, seeing most Western markets closed to them as a result. Time will tell.
Moving forward, we should expect to see more Chinese commercial space companies at more conferences selling more wares, be it under their own name or the name of some completely different company. This may enable nascent space sectors elsewhere to get more bang for their buck, but can also create long-term dependencies on China, and in more established space industries, threats to incumbents. Other countries and companies should take note, and recognize that there’s a potential avalanche of Chinese commercial space industrial capacity on the horizon.
And in other news this month
The second batch of 18 satellites of the Thousand Sails (G60) constellation were launched from Taiyuan. Operator SpaceSail has repeatedly announced plans for 108 satellites by EOY, which is beginning to look more plausible. The first batch of satellites, launched in August, was built by CAS SECM, a Chinese Academy of Sciences spinoff in Shanghai, while the second batch was built by SECM JV Genesat, utilizing different suppliers for critical payloads. The launch was accompanied by an announcement from the MIIT about their strengthening orbital resources, mentioning specifically that Thousand Sails uses Ku, Q, and V-band, as well as other frequency bands.
As if following our cue from last month’s China Space Monitor, both Laser Starcom and HiStarlink announced funding rounds of “hundreds of millions of yuan” within days of one another. Both companies have developed multiple laser communication terminals that have been trialed on-orbit, and both expect to spend much of the funding on ramping up production of their laser terminals. HiStarlink also highlighted their performance relative to Starlink, stating that their terminals are focused on longer-distance communications and smaller satellite platforms.
China SatNet took a few more baby steps towards operation, moving into their new HQ building in Xiong’an (near Beijing) and signing an agreement with the Pudong New District Government of Shanghai, while Genesat/G60 continued to move quickly, with Genesat announcing a new factory in the Liangxi District of Wuxi. Not to be outdone, meteorological satellite operator Yunyao Yuhang announced plans for a factory in Wuxi as well during the month.
Geely Group Chairman Li Shufu took the stage at the 2024 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference, where he highlighted GeeSpace’s initiatives (30 satellites on-orbit, 24hr coverage of 90% of the earth’s surface). Giving a hint as to the company’s broader visions, Li also touched on Geely’s investment in AeroFugia, an urban air mobility company. From our paywalled archives, a feature piece on GeeSpace’s space ambitions.
China’s satellite direct-to-device market continued to evolve apace, with the latest Honor X60 phone being released with BeiDou SMS connectivity. The mass-market smartphone is priced at just ~¥1,000 (US$150), and is indication of perceived interest in satellite D2D, even at the low end of the market.
Other Chinese consumer markets continued to get more involved in space, with CALT commercial subsidiary China Rocket and luxury BYD sub-brand Fangchengbao announcing collaboration on crewed spaceflight. While somewhat vague, it is likely to take a page from SpaceX’s book and drive taikonauts to the launch site in Fangchengbao cars. This also shows one key difference between the state-owned CALT parent company and its nominally commercial subsidiary China Rocket: it is easier for China Rocket to have collaboration of this kind with a car company.
Several more cities and provinces announced development plans for a space/satcom industry. This month the Northeastern city of Shenyang announced plans for a “satellite valley”, the city of Zhuzhou in Hunan ramped up support for the already-planned 8-satellite Zhuhou constellation (they’re building a factory with a capacity of 150 satellites per year to furnish it), while Guangdong Province in the south published an action plan for “Promoting the High-Quality Development of Commercial Space (2024-2028)”.
And finally, a great deep-dive video of China’s reusable rocket ambitions, and how close they are to achieving them, from our good friend Jean over at the Dongfang Hour YouTube channel.
Thanks for reading, until next month!
Blaine