China’s giant Spacesail constellation seeks more funding
Spacesail, one of the largest of China’s planned constellations designed to compete with Starlink, is now seeking more funding to build its full constellation of 10,000 to 14,000 satellites.
Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology, or SpaceSail, a satellite communications company developing a massive constellation known as “Qianfan,” disclosed plans to bring in new investors through a capital increase, according to a notice published on the Shanghai United Assets and Equity Exchange.
At present, this Chinese pseudo-company has launched only 119 out of the constellation’s first phase of 648 satellites. While it has gotten Airbus to sign a contract to use its constellation on its airplanes, it also appears to be somewhat cash poor, having only about $150 million on hand (much of it government funding), and is not going to meet its international licensing requirement to get those 648 satellites in orbit by the end of this year.
This new funding round announcement suggests it is in need of capital, and is having trouble getting the Chinese government to cough up the additional funds.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Spacesail, one of the largest of China’s planned constellations designed to compete with Starlink, is now seeking more funding to build its full constellation of 10,000 to 14,000 satellites.
Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology, or SpaceSail, a satellite communications company developing a massive constellation known as “Qianfan,” disclosed plans to bring in new investors through a capital increase, according to a notice published on the Shanghai United Assets and Equity Exchange.
At present, this Chinese pseudo-company has launched only 119 out of the constellation’s first phase of 648 satellites. While it has gotten Airbus to sign a contract to use its constellation on its airplanes, it also appears to be somewhat cash poor, having only about $150 million on hand (much of it government funding), and is not going to meet its international licensing requirement to get those 648 satellites in orbit by the end of this year.
This new funding round announcement suggests it is in need of capital, and is having trouble getting the Chinese government to cough up the additional funds.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I would not be interested in using an internet link that went through the hands of the Chinese Communists. As far as I am concerned they can fall flat on their face.
“and is having trouble getting the Chinese government to cough up the additional funds.”
The godless Chicoms have been having a string of bad luck lately. The latest being Venezuela and Iran were important oil suppliers.
The PRC is, of course, utterly bankrupt by any reasonable financial reckoning, though it continues to add briskly to its total debt. But I suspect that even the status-obsessed PRC will be trimming its sails at least a bit going forward. This is the first year, for example, that the PRC has accepted an annual GDP growth target below 5%. Generating fake GDP with borrowed funds is just getting too expensive even for the PRC.
One major problem with the Quianfan constellation, in particular, is that its birds seem to mass almost an order of magnitude more apiece than do SpaceX’s current Starlink birds. Only a handful of these birds can be deployed at a time even using launchers as capable as the Long March 5 (LM-5). But the LM-5 is a 5-meter-diameter rocket as is, also, the Long March 10, slated to launch the PRC’s first crewed Moon missions. Given the demands on production of 5-meter-diameter stage structures for the latter program, it’s quite unlikely that many more – or possibly any more – LM-5s will be made available for Quianfan deployments.
This will require reliance on smaller rockets with correspondingly smaller payloads. And, at least for now, all such PRC rockets are entirely expendable. Thus, Quianfan’s backers find themselves in the same position as Amazon is with its Leo constellation – way behind the nominal deployment schedule mandated by, in the PRC’s case, the International Telecommunications Union.
I, of course, have long been on record maintaining that the entire PRC edifice has been built upon both demographic and economic sand and that a brittle fracture is due in, at most, a few more years. When the PRC collapses, so will all of its space efforts. That will render the barely-started Quianfan constellation merely a part of the problem left to the West – and, really, to the US – of clearing Earth orbit of all legacy PRC satellites and debris.
On the “bright” side, the rate at which Ukraine is currently battering Russia to bits may result in that nation’s terminal implosion occurring even sooner than that of the PRC. In such a case, we in the West – mainly or completely the US – might already have developed some considerable expertise and experience in clearing the skies of dead-nation-state space leftovers by the time the PRC’s stuff is added to our to-do list.
Dick: It seems to me that China just might be about to run out of other people’s money. Just maybe.
Robert Zimmerman,
I certainly hope so. The supply of “greater fools” to whom the “lesser fools” who bought into the PRC Potemkin Village earlier can off-load their shares and notes must be getting a bit thin by now. My one hope is that that dwindling population still includes some American left-wing billionaires. Bankrupting some of them would have a decidedly tonic effect on US politics.
The decapitation of the Maduro regime in Venezuela, the imminent collapse of the Cuban regime, the ongoing forcible erasure of the Iranian regime, and all of the other lower-profile resumptions of US assertion in the Western Hemisphere coming, as they have, in such a flurry, must have Xi and his toadies in the PRC wondering “Who’s next?” and suspecting it may be them. Personally, my money is on Russia being next, a victim of massive direct damage by the increasingly capable Ukrainians and collateral damage accruing from all of the other injuries being inflicted upon the Axis of Scumbags by the Trump administration though not, sadly, because of any direct action by Trump and his Merry Band against the Putin regime.
But there is growing civil unrest in the PRC. That, perhaps in combination with an actual coup attempt by the broadly disaffected elements of the PRC military, might well suddenly bubble up into something at least as dangerous to the Xi regime as the sudden mass street protests in Iran that kicked off the current events there. Autocracy everywhere seems very much on the back foot these days. The only previous time like the present in living memory was the 1989-91 period when the Soviet Union was coming unstuck. The zeitgeist of those times was sufficient to kick off massive popular uprisings in the PRC as well, culminating in the Tien An Men Square Massacre and decades more of political repression. Something even more consequential – and successful – could happen again and at pretty much any time.
Over at the Secret Projects Forum, I read about protesters calling in air strikes….which is good news.
Space based weapons should be a priority in that they can respond much faster than carriers and other Cold War assets that take weeks to get into position. Way more costly than SLS/NASP/Apollo combined.
Sea Dragon, anyone?
If not Alabama, maybe give shipyards some bank—cheaper than ballistic missile subs with all that goes into them
Also..each dollar on rocketry also goes to shipwrights–so a two-fer.