8 comments

• Dick Eagleson

  December 6, 2025 at 4:07 pm

  “Should take awhile to complete.”

  Our host has a gift for epically dry understatement. The first of those roughly 114 satellites went up a year ago. At the rate of 114 per year, it would take over a century to reach the notionally planned 13,000 birds on-orbit.

  But that deployment interval, of course, implicitly assumes an open-ended service life for each bird. Satellites do not have open-ended service lives. If their average service lives match the five years of Starlink birds, and there is also no radical increase in deployment cadence, then the Guowang constellation would hit an equilibrium population of 570 or so after five years and then be stuck there. If the birds are built to match the 15-year service lives of normative GEO comsats, the equilibrium constellation population would be 1,710-ish after a decade and a half of deployments at the current rate.

  Obviously, the PRC needs to engineer a well-over-order-of-magnitude increase in deployment cadence relative to the past year’s performance if it expects to get this constellation to anywhere near its notional planned maximum of 13,000 birds and then keep it there. Specifically, it needs – assuming five year bird lives – to be able to launch 2,600 sats per year. That’s a near 23-fold increase over what it has demonstrated to-date. Longer sat lives reduce this requirement proportionally, but even 15-year sats would need to be deployed at a rate over 7.5 times what has thus far been managed.

  The recent debut of the partially reusable Falcon 9-class Zhuque-3 provides some potential increase to deployment cadence – once its 1st stages are landing reliably. But to actually match even Falcon 9’s Starlink deployment cadence it would have to launch roughly twice as often as Falcon 9 as the Guowang sats apparently weigh about twice as much as a Starlink V2-Mini so only half as many can go up on a single mission.

  We know Zhuque-3 has at least one pad it can launch from. SpaceX currently has three Falcon 9 pads in service with a fourth set to debut sometime next year. SpaceX is also able to reliably launch from two of its three pads at 3 – 4-day intervals. So to roughly match raw sat deployment numbers, the PRC must be able to launch Zhuque-3 from six pads with four of them able to match SpaceX’s turnaround norms for SLC-4E at Vandy and SLC-40 at Canaveral. Hardly capabilities that can be whistled up overnight.

  The PRC doesn’t yet have recovery capability in place for Zhuque-3’s payload fairings either, though it is said to intend to do so in future so we can give them a pass on that for now. As these fairings would have to land on land instead of in the more forgiving ocean, the irreparable damage rate can be expected to be higher than that for SpaceX. That could be mitigated by building the five additional needed launch pads at Wenchang and launching over the ocean.

  Finally, there is the matter of expendable 2nd stage production. SpaceX is rapidly closing in on a production cadence of 200 per year for these items – and will likely reach and perhaps even exceed that mark in the coming year. Can the PRC build 400 Zhuque-3 2nd stages per year? Certainly not now. How long until it can – if ever?

  At the end of the day, the production and launch logistics demands of just this one megaconstellation seem well beyond the PRC’s capabilities in the relatively little time it has remaining as a going concern. And that is without even considering the other giant 5-figure megaconstellation the PRC is also trying to field.

  We are probably fortunate that the PRC’s capabilities fall so far short of its ambitions. When the PRC rattles to pieces a few years hence, it will leave behind all sorts of messes for others to clean up. The further the PRC falls short of its LEO megaconstellation ambitions, the less tidying of LEO will need to be done once it is gone.
• Jeff Wright

  December 7, 2025 at 1:07 am

  They know they are behind.

  We have SpaceX, with ULA and others bringing up the rear.

  China just sets up what they think will be several SpaceX clones…and maybe get LM-9 as a sat launcher.

  Their solids are what worries me. That’s ICBM tech.
  Liquid fueled engines could benefit from engineers across the planet.
• Dick Eagleson

  December 7, 2025 at 9:10 am

  Jeff Wright,

  It would be nice if more people in the US also knew the PRC is behind. To hear a lot of our overly credulous fellow citizens tell it, the PRC will be running the world at some point in the current century. In actual fact, this will be the century during which the entire Han ethnicity all but disappears. The PRC regime will be gone a lot sooner than that.

  It is true that there are a plethora of would-be F9-ish clones being worked on in the PRC. One of them even flew a payload successfully to orbit on its first launch a few days ago – though its 1st stage failed to stick the attempted landing. We’ll likely see at least two or three more such debut over the next year or two. None of these craft, even in combination, is going to be able to support anywhere near the launch cadence SpaceX can already get from Falcon 9. The needed production capacity simply doesn’t exist.

  PRC solids aren’t exactly a new thing so “commercial” solid launchers don’t bother me to any additional extent. I am bothered by deployed PRC solid-fuel ICBMs, but I expect to feel a lot better about that once Golden Dome is even partially deployed.

  The “commercial” PRC solid-fueled launchers have not proven particularly reliable in service which also calls into question just how reliable the actual deployed weapons are. I don’t think the level of casual malfunction expectable from the PRC ICBM force is anywhere remotely as dire as that of Russian ICBMs is – in all likelihood. The PRC can still do maintenance – something for which the Russians appear to have lost the knack. The PRC can also build new missiles that actually work – again, unlike the Russians, who have blown up about as many Sarmats in tests as Elon has blown up Starships.

  Liquid-fueled engine technology has never been healthier in the US and is also doing pretty well in other places. The one exception in the US is the sole remaining legacy engine maker, AJR – now part of L3 Harris. AJR completely lacks the ability to build any large engines at scale or for a reasonable price.

  There are a dozen or more NewSpace outfits that have designed and built more than two dozen new large liquid-fueled engine types of various operating cycles over the past decade. These continue to emerge from development and make their flight debuts with some regularity. We should see several significant such events occur in the coming year.
• Jeff Wright

  December 7, 2025 at 3:40 pm

  Truax and Beal could have been where Elon is now had folks listened. Pressure-fed could have been simpled.

  I would have thought Kistler the team to beat…’chutes and airbags…no hoverslam….just have a transponder on it and send Quint and Anton Chigurh to drag it back to shore–the latter to give Greenpeace the evil eye :)
• Dick Eagleson

  December 7, 2025 at 6:04 pm

  Jeff Wright,

  Truax and Beal and a number of others had the misfortune to start their enterprises during the scorched earth era at NASA anent private-sector launch companies that ran pretty much for a quarter-century from the late ’70s to the Columbia disaster. All of NASA, particularly your scumbag “heroes” at Marshall, bad-mouthed any potential space launch investors who came sniffing around any of their offices to do due diligence. Having proven serially incapable of doing anything useful themselves, they were only too happy to keep anyone else from breaking out and making them look bad.

  Beal came closest to piercing the NASA Siegfried Line, but was just a few years too premature in starting out. SpaceX started less than a year before Columbia and was far too small to attract any malignant NASA attention in its days of infancy.

  But the biggest advantage Musk had – besides timing – was nine figures of his own money he could put toward the SpaceX project and ready access to another nine figures from people he had previously worked with, and made money for, in Silicon Valley. None of them needed to do any “due diligence” at NASA. They were investing in Musk who was, to them, a very well-known – and high-quality – quantity. They didn’t know what NASA thought and wouldn’t have cared if they did.

  Kistler is kind of a hybrid case. In the wake of Columbia, when it became painfully obvious that the Shuttle was a dead spacecraft walking, Kistler should have been in the cat-bird seat – except it also lacked money. Some recently ex-NASA suits decided that Kistler was ripe for the picking so they did the usual wave-off of other potential investors, put together some capital, bought a controlling interest, then merged Kistler with one of their other holdings, showed the founders and the technical team the door, abandoned the original vehicle design and came up with something a lot more conventional and contracted out fabrication to the usual legacy contractor suspects they had all been good buddies with for decades. NASA lifer management of a private-sector company combined with legacy aerospace hardware contracting – what could possibly go wrong?

  Other potential investors who didn’t necessarily know much about space launch but could certainly read a balance sheet took one look at RpKistler’s burn rate and fled in the opposite direction. RpK failed to raise the minimum outside capital mandated by NASA for COTS participants, got dropped from the program and promptly went bust.

  So the fates of Beal, Truax, et al had nothing to do with whether “folks had listened” and everything to do with long-time NASA policy to strangle any new space launch company that crossed its line of sight in its crib. With von Braun dead, NASA began to emulate a quite different German – Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

  Now perhaps you can understand my enthusiasm for treating Marshall with the same tender mercy the Romans showed to Carthage.
• wayne

  December 7, 2025 at 6:48 pm

  “Videtur et hoc mihi, Carthaginem non debere esse.”

  [ ‘It seems best to me that Carthage no longer exist’]
• Dick Eagleson

  December 8, 2025 at 1:35 am

  wayne,

  There ya go. Carthago delenda est as they used to say.
• Edward

  December 9, 2025 at 2:27 pm

  Jeff Wright,
  You wrote: “Truax and Beal could have been where Elon is now had folks listened.”

  You mean had NASA and Congress, which required all U.S. payloads to use the Space Shuttle, listened. Truax definitely wanted to start his own commercial launch company, circa 1980, but could not find investors, what with the ban. The people you deplore for not listening are the same people you think should remain in charge of space access. With SLS, they still are not listening.

  You present me with yet another nail for Marshall’s coffin.