Weekly Brain Droppings, 17-23 November
Guangdong' Space Ambitions Grow 🚀 Updates from Brazil 🇧🇷 and the Wuhan Satellite Internet Industry Forum 🛰️
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the second edition of the Weekly Brain Droppings, thanks for stopping by. Diving right in this week with some thoughts on China’s space industrial bases:
First, as of Saturday 23 November, China is within striking distance of its 2023 total for satellites successfully orbited. In 2023, Chinese rockets sent 216 satellites into orbit, so far in 2024, we’re at 214. Notably, this was done with fewer launches (55, compared to 66 in 2023). It’s anyone’s guess, but I would not be surprised if we exceed 250 satellites launched by China by the end of this year.
Last week’s Zhuhai Air Show brought more than 600,000 visitors to Southern China to see the latest in air and space. Around the time of the show, Guangdong Province (of which Zhuhai is a part) announced the Guangdong Commercial Space Industry Promotion Association, which aims to develop a stronger space sector in the province. And this is kind of important, because Guangdong has a population of >100M people and GDP of ~$2T, roughly the size of New York State in terms of economy and three times the population of California. In short, if a province like Guangdong—where most of the world’s cellular towers, mobile phones, and drones are built—can get its space industry up and running, it will be quite a sight to see. And this week got us one step closer to that.
Elsewhere this week, we saw the Wuhan Satellite Internet Industry Forum take place in Wuhan, with one of our colleagues in-attendance and taking copious notes (get in touch for more info on our China Space Conference Reporting offering). Among other things, CASIC is a major organizer of the conference, with the company always happy to brandish its Wuhan Space Industrial Base credentials.
Over in Brazil, we saw a report from Bloomberg from a couple of weeks ago about Brazilian authorities speaking with Chinese interlocutors about satellite internet. Apparently things over there move fast, with Thousand Sails constellation operator SpaceSail signing an MoU with Telebras on 20 November. The MoU calls for SpaceSail to help Brazil with digital divide initiatives with a planned service start in the country of 2026. This represents a major milestone for China’s NGSO communications constellations, with Starlink accessing new markets very rapidly, and with Chinese competition playing catch-up in a very real sense.
Telebras and SpaceSail Admiring their MoU. Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hGlBp7SooxNHx5jRl2fNxA And finally, Expace announced rideshare opportunities on the Kuaizhou-11 Y7 rocket launch, planned for March/April 2025. Expace is CASIC’s commercial launch subsidiary, and the company has made a reasonable name for itself by developing the Kuaizhou-1A rocket, with some ~25 launch attempts of which ~20 have been successful.
And that’s all for this week. Be on the lookout next week for the full monthly China Space Monitor. Until then, stay well!
Blaine