One of China’s big satellite constellations appears in troubleAccording to a report in China’s state-run press today, one of the giant satellite constellations China is building to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is in trouble, and will likely fail to meet its international licensing requirement to place more than six hundred satellites in orbit by the end of 2025.
Only 90 satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit for the Qianfan broadband network – also known as the Thousand Sails Constellation or G60 Starlink – well short of the project’s goal of 648 by the end of this year.
Under international regulations to prevent spectrum hoarding, satellite operators must deploy a certain proportion of their constellation within set times after securing orbits and radio frequencies.
Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology, the company leading the project, plans to deploy more than 15,000 satellites by 2030 to deliver direct-to-phone internet services worldwide.
To meet its license requirement, it require a launch pace for the rest of ’25 of about 30 satellites per month, something that the article says is unlikely due to “a severe shortage of rockets” in China.
This story might also explain why China’s government yesterday ordered all its rocket pseudo-companies to speed up their test schedules, pushing to launch their new rockets for the first time this year instead of in 2026. The Xi government’s order appears to be trying to address this rocket shortage.
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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
According to a report in China’s state-run press today, one of the giant satellite constellations China is building to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is in trouble, and will likely fail to meet its international licensing requirement to place more than six hundred satellites in orbit by the end of 2025.
Only 90 satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit for the Qianfan broadband network – also known as the Thousand Sails Constellation or G60 Starlink – well short of the project’s goal of 648 by the end of this year.
Under international regulations to prevent spectrum hoarding, satellite operators must deploy a certain proportion of their constellation within set times after securing orbits and radio frequencies.
Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology, the company leading the project, plans to deploy more than 15,000 satellites by 2030 to deliver direct-to-phone internet services worldwide.
To meet its license requirement, it require a launch pace for the rest of ’25 of about 30 satellites per month, something that the article says is unlikely due to “a severe shortage of rockets” in China.
This story might also explain why China’s government yesterday ordered all its rocket pseudo-companies to speed up their test schedules, pushing to launch their new rockets for the first time this year instead of in 2026. The Xi government’s order appears to be trying to address this rocket shortage.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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
Whether or not the PRC ever succeeds in “competing” with Starlink is problematical but it seems to be successfully competing with Amazon’s Project Kuiper in the “slow race” to fail to meet deployment goals.
The new rockets whose development the regime is urging be speeded up are likely those that promise at least 1st-stage reusability. The PRC is discovering, as Amazon has before it and the Europeans – should they persist with plans for their IRIS2 constellation – will in future, that putting up a large satellite constellation on disposable rockets is a mug’s game doomed to failure.
In the meantime, confusion to the enemy.
I can just see the people building hardware at Space X saying “Rocket shortage!?! Not on MY watch!”. How lame is the chi-com government? Let me count the ways!
This news suits me just fine.
China is perhaps the most competent enemy the United States ever faced.
I really don’t care about the Uiygurs–after 9/11, we wanted to nuke Mecca and Medina.
I will give China this–they have no use for the Mohammedidian hordes.
We didn’t have the stomach to do what was needed.
I actually hope their Silk Road II ideas come to fruition for two reasons:
1.) Occupation will tax them financially
2.) With any luck–China prevails and no one is left on the planet who knows who Mohammad even was.
I admire their bloody-mindedness.
We lost ours
I try to follow real news out of China.
They are in real world trouble.
The economy has tanked totally, all the people outside the CCP leaders are essentially slaves.Half of the nations involved with the Belt and Road initiative are not paying back the cash loaned to them. And in some cases they are stopping China from removing minerals as payment either.
They had 1000 different electric car companies and 400 of them just went out of business. Just closed their doors overnight.
Nations are no longer allowing Chinese electric car sales in their nations because of quality problems.
The list goes on and on. If you think that a little inflation is a reason to riot try not being paid by your company at all, in a nation with NO social programs. None at all.
Homelessness might be as high as 20% over the whole of the population.
Their society is so broken that people are burning down the place they work at over less than 500 US dollars in back pay. Dozens of factories are being torched across China. A new fire almost every day.
Who is going to go in and stop China from launching anything they feel like at any time?
The UN?
Their word means nothing.
Jeff Wright,
You don’t really seem to know very much about the PRC.
As competent enemies go, the PRC is well to the rear of both the Nazis and the Soviets – both of whom are no more it should be pointed out. The PRC – as pzatchok correctly notes – is well on its own way to joining both in the dustbin of history. The only real sporting proposition currently in play is whether it’s the PRC or the Russian Federation that becomes the next sizable occupant of that particular receptacle. I’m no longer anywhere near young, but even I think I might last long enough to see both of these long-time nuisances finally put paid to before I check out.
Jeff Wright,
I personally do care for your attitude about all Muslims.
I know their religion is a truly false one and they are learning over time that very same lesson.
We would do better converting them than harming them.
pzatchok,
As an atheist, I do not believe any religion is true. That said, Islam is an obvious rip-off pastiche of both Judaism and Christianity which combines all of their least appetizing characteristics, mixes these liberally with nomadic tribal barbarian social norms and leaves out nearly all of the good stuff. As such, Islam is the most successful instance of intellectual property theft in history.
That said, Islam has also been dangerous mainly when it has been on its uppers – as it has been for much of the past century following the discovery of massive oil deposits in the Middle East – and following several centuries of near-irrelevance after the sea routes of the Age of Discovery all but put paid to the old Silk Road, off of which Islam formerly made a good living.
Even so, the worst adherents of Islam – Middle Eastern Arabs and Berbers – seem to yield up some jihadi yay-hoo every century or so who aims to finish conquering the world for Islam. In the 19th Century that was the Mahdi and his followers. In the 20th century it was Khomeini and Bin Laden – depending upon whether one prefers one’s modern Mahdi in Shia or Sunni flavor. The Mahdi was strictly a local nuisance in his time as Islam’s pockets were very much empty. Khomeini and Bin Laden had oil money with which to make trouble on a global scale.
Once the oil money goes away – which it should by mid-century or thereabouts – the Middle East – which is where the worst Islamic trouble always seems to start – will lose the monetary underpinnings of its fundamentally unsupportable lifestyle, the population will suffer a drastic contraction to the level the land can support without outside inputs and Islam will, once again, cease to be much of a problem except to its deluded adherents.
These, as you hint, may be fewer, over time, given the ubiquity of modern communications tech even in the cultural backwaters of the world, and the future inability of barely-there Islamic nation states to mount an effective interdiction of efforts around their peripheries to lure away their adherents by aggressive proselytizers of other faiths – mainly Christian or adjacent denominations such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
It is my fond hope that, by century’s end, what little is left of Islam will look back even upon the time of the Crusades as being – comparatively – The Good Old Days.
Look up Jay Smith. He rips Islam and Mohamed apart.
There is evidence that Islam started as a bastardized form of Christianity. It was eventually changed into a way to control the followers by the Arab rulers. It was changed to accept and appeal to the culture in the area and times.
Its a religion supported by cognitive dissonance. Sort of like the left today.