Why China is building a Starlink system of its own

When it is finished, Qianfan could number 14,000 satellites

ADEK BERRY / AFP

A long March-2F carrier rocket carrying the Shenzhou-19 spacecraft and crew of three astronauts lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, in the Gobi desert, northwest China, on October 30, 2024.

Why China is building a Starlink system of its own

The Economist

last update on 13 Dec 2024

On 5 December, a Long March 6a rocket blasted off from Taiyuan Satellite Centre in Shanxi province in northern China. Aboard was the third batch of satellites for the Qianfan, or “SpaceSail” network, which aims to deploy a “mega-constellation” of thousands of satellites to beam fast internet access to users anywhere in the world.

Qianfan is similar to Starlink, a satellite internet service provided by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company. Starlink has been a big success in the four years since it started operations, signing up airlines, cruise ships and more than 4 million individual users and helping boost SpaceX’s valuation to a reported $350bn. Providing high-speed internet anywhere on Earth requires enormous numbers of satellites. Starlink already has almost 7,000 satellites in orbit. It has regulatory permission to fly up to 12,000 within the next few years and has filed paperwork requesting as many as 42,000 in total.

Qianfan—which is sometimes also known, confusingly, as “G60 Starlink” after a highway in the south of China where officials want to build a cluster of space companies—appears to be designed on a similarly heroic scale. Although precise details are hard to come by, documents filed with the International Telecommunication Union, which regulates such things, suggest the constellation could eventually grow to nearly 14,000 satellites.

The first two batches, of 18 satellites each, were launched in August and October. Reports in Chinese state media suggest a target of 648 satellites in space by the end of 2025. Qianfan, which is backed by the Shanghai city government, therefore appears to have beaten GuoWang, a similar constellation backed by China’s central government, to orbit.

The system could help connect people in China’s rural hinterland to the internet. Despite the country’s rapid industrialisation, around 300 million people are thought to lack regular internet access. Starlink is not an option for these people since that network does not have an operating licence in China, whose authorities run a sophisticated and pervasive system of internet censorship. Qianfan might find markets overseas, too—besides China, Starlink is also forbidden from operating in Iran and Russia.

Even countries that are not outright hostile towards America might welcome a competitor to SpaceX, says Steven Feldstein, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—especially given the close links between Mr Musk and Donald Trump, America’s president-elect. “Even countries with a more neutral foreign policy, like India or Turkey—that might give them pause,” he says.

In November, for instance, Qianfan announced a deal with the government of Brazil. Earlier in the year, Mr Musk had entered into a bitter public row with a Brazilian judge who had been investigating X, a social network that Mr Musk owns. As part of the dispute, SpaceX’s Brazilian bank accounts were frozen. Afterward,s the firm said it would not comply with the judge’s order to block Brazilian users’ access to X, though it later backed down.

Even countries that are not outright hostile towards America might welcome a competitor to SpaceX

Steven Feldstein, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Qianfan is part of a suite of technologies that make up China's space ambitions. "We've seen a pretty wide push when it comes to Chinese investment in space technology," says Mr Feldstein. He cites projects like the Tiangong series of space stations or the Chang'e 6 mission, which in June became the first probe to return samples taken from the far side of the Moon, as well as China's ambitions to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030.

Rather than more scientific firsts or space-exploration prestige, though, Qianfan's other use is likely to be military. "It's becoming increasingly clear that (mega-constellations) are a strategically important piece of infrastructure for countries of a certain size and ambition," says Blaine Curcio, who runs Orbital Gateway Consulting, a business based in Hong Kong that focuses on the Chinese space industry. China's government made building a Starlink-style mega-constellation an official priority in 2020. Governments in Europe, India, Russia, and Taiwan have all expressed interest in building constellations of their own.

Starlink has proved its military utility in Russia's war on Ukraine, where Ukrainian soldiers came to rely on the system as a means of fast, ubiquitous front-line connectivity, useful for everything from controlling drones to communicating with headquarters. Besides its uses there, SpaceX has set up a dedicated government division called Starshield. It has signed deals with America's Space Force and with the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the country's spy satellites.

In a war, mega-constellations like Starlink and Qianfan, which rely on large numbers of small, cheap satellites, would almost certainly prove more resilient to anti-satellite weapons than systems built from smaller numbers of more expensive spacecraft. China's military doctrine, says Mr Feldstein, is moving towards networked armed forces that need to shuttle data between sensors and weapons at high speed. "There is no way that can work unless you have reliable battlefield connectivity," he says.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the GSAT-20 satellite aboard launches from Launch Complex 40 at NASA Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on November 18, 2024.

One question is how quickly China can build the system it has designed on paper. The country presently lacks access to reusable (and therefore cheap) rockets like SpaceX's Falcon 9, which are used to launch Starlink satellites, let alone the much bigger, cheaper Starship rocket that the firm is testing. SpaceX has also been able to drive down the cost of both the satellites themselves and the high-tech antennas necessary to receive their signals on the ground.

But China is good at mass production. And, says Mr Curcio, it has a thriving cluster of between 40 and 50 rocket-launch startups, many of which are hard at work on reusable rockets. Some of those engineers seem to have been taking copious notes: at a trade show in November, the state-controlled China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology unveiled a version of the Long March 9, a new rocket it is developing, that bore a remarkable resemblance to SpaceX's Starship. It is due, apparently, to make its first flight in 2033.

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