Steven Feldstein
Early in the morning on August 9, a Long March 6A rocket blasted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi. The rocket carried eighteen low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites from the government-backed company Qianfan. State media hailed the launch as China’s answer to Starlink, the U.S.-based satellite internet pioneer, and the first step toward breaking America’s dominance in this market. Qianfan intends to grow its constellation to more than 600 satellites by the end of 2025 and to eventually place 14,000 satellites into orbit.
Qianfan isn’t the only Chinese company with satellite internet ambitions. Several other Chinese outfits are also racing to launch their own megaconstellations—large pools of satellites that work together to deliver broadband internet access. The Guowang project, for example, run by state-owned China Satellite Network Group, has announced plans to create a constellation of 13,000 satellites—although it has yet to send any into space. Overall, China’s leaders hope to launch 40,000 LEO satellites in the coming decade.
China’s push to enter the satellite internet market shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has poured significant resources into closing the gap with America’s space-based technologies, and its efforts are starting to pay off. In June, Chinese scientists oversaw an ambitious effort to land a space probe on the far side of the moon—representing the first successful attempt by any country to place a probe on the moon’s distant corner, a feat fraught with technical complications. China plans to send crewed missions to the moon by 2030 and build a lunar base on the moon’s south pole by 2035. As geopolitical rivalry between the two nations heats up, Beijing is determined to keep pace with America’s satellites.
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