Update on China SatNet's GuoWang broadband constellation -- can they do it?

In 2020, China applied to operate GuoWang, a constellation of 12,992 low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband Internet satellites, and in 2021, it became clear that it was intended to become China's global LEO broadband constellation. Can they do it? Maybe, but it will take a long time.

Launch capability

Chinese launch startups (source)

China does not have the capacity to launch 12,992 satellites today. I don't know the mass of their planned satellites, but GuoWang is informally referred to as China's answer to Starlink. Starlink's version 1 satellites were 262 kg each and version 2 is said to be between 800 and 1,250 kg. If, say, the GuoWang satellites turn out to weigh 500 kg, the constellation would require 260 launches using China's most powerful rocket, the Long March 5, assuming no failures and ignoring replacement, and it would be 867 launches using the forthcoming, reusable Long March 8.

But times are changing. In a recent DongFang Hour podcast, Jean Deville said there are about twenty new commercial launch companies in China, and they were raising an unprecedented amount of money. While none of these is in the class of SpaceX's Starship, which they say will be able to launch >100 tons to LEO, China's forthcoming Long March 9 is being designed to launch 150 tons to LEO. (Elon Musk tweeted that they might be able to get it up to ~150 tons in a reusable Starship).

Launching and maintaining a constellation of 12,992 satellites would require a coalition of commercial startups and/or the Long March 9. (In an idealistic, united world one could imagine iconoclastic Elon Musk offering to launch GuoWang satellites using Starships).

Satellite manufacture

GalaxySpace satellite "super factory" (source)

As of last September, China only had 431 satellites in orbit. Chinese state-owned enterprises clearly do not have the capacity to produce and maintain satellites for a mega constellation. As with launch, one or perhaps a coalition of private companies could be called upon to manufacture GuoWang satellites. 

As Deville put it, "2022 could be year one of the significant if not massive deployment of Chinese small satellites." He cited the example of the completion of the GalaxySpace satellite production line at their "super factory" in Nantong and showed the first six broadband communication satellites that were just completed. He also described several other satellite manufacturing companies including auto manufacturer Geely, which has a factory capable of producing 500 satellites per year and deep mass production experience.

Optical links and ground infrastructure

Inter-satellite optical links are a priority for LEO constellations -- they will reduce latency and the need for ground stations -- and China has relatively poor access to global ground infrastructure. As with launch and satellite manufacture, there are promising optical communication start-ups, but China lags established companies like Mynaric and Tesat and is precluded from using their products by the current technology cold war and Xi's Made in China 2025 policy. 

Optical links between satellites and the ground could compensate in part for a lack of radio-frequency ground stations and China's recently released Five-year Perspective white paper says they have tested satellite-ground laser communication. Ground station load can also be reduced by relaying data through geostationary satellites and the Five-year Perspective includes a commitment to a coordinated multi-orbit communication system.

Amazon offers ground-station service; AWS Aerospace and Satellite Solutions offers space/terrestrial systems consulting service and Microsoft offers Azure Orbital ground station service, which enables satellite access to its Azure cloud services. Will Chinese Web services and terrestrial infrastructure companies integrate with GuoWang?

Politics

Belt and Road nations, January 2021 (source)

GuoWang is behind SpaceX Starlink and nearly as far behind the OneWeb, Telesat, and Amazon Kuiper constellations, but the political division between China and the US may protect it enough to survive. Starlink service will not be allowed in China, and they will discourage it in nations that participate in their Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, and GuoWang service will not be allowed in the United States or nations with which we are closely allied. 

This division shields GuoWang from competitive market pressure and it locks in global waste and economic inefficiency by ensuring that LEO constellations will be able to route traffic but will otherwise be idle while orbiting over "enemy" nations. 

I've reviewed three areas in which GuoWang needs to catch up, but GuoWang, Starlink and the other would-be broadband Internet service providers also face joint constraints like LEO debris and spectrum scarcity, (Note that SpaceX has also applied to launch 30,000 more broadband satellites). Optical links between constellations and the ground may relax the spectrum constraint if inter-satellite routing algorithms are climate-sensitive but global collaboration is needed to deal with debris, collision avoidance, and spectrum scarcity.

GuoWang is facing an uphill battle. If SpaceX and the others do not go bankrupt, they will have been operating for years before GuoWang completes a 12,992-satellite constellation. On the other hand, the Chinese government has given GuoWang high priority, their lunar, Martian, and space station programs started long after ours, and China plans to "build a satellite communications network with high and low orbit coordination" within the next five years.

Update 2/22/2022

GuoWang got political affirmation recently when China Satnet signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Shanghai Municipal Government. (Like state governments in the US, Chinese municipal governments often support commercial efforts). Satnet is a state-owned enterprise, but its executives visited commercial satellite constellation operator Guodian Gaoke signaling openness to cooperation with Chinese commercial space firms. 

It seems clear now that GuoWang will be China's global broadband provider, not Hongyun and Hongyan, less ambitious broadband constellation projects of powerful state-owned enterprises CASC and CASIC.

Update 3/13/2022

The Dongfang Hour reports that the Long March 9 will not be ready to launch for 8-10 years. How many satellites will GuoWang's competitors have in orbit by then? They also reported that the six broadband communication satellites mentioned above were launched. The satellites have a mass of 190kg and a throughput of 40 Gbps.

Several companies are ramping up to build satellites, so a coalition may be able to equip GuoWang, but launch capacity seems to be an even more significant constraint. Either way, they have a long way to go. Here's a wild dream -- SpaceX could launch GuoWang satellites. Elon Musk has been known to help competitors -- he put 249 Tesla patents in the public domain in 2014.

Update 7/22/2022

As we saw earlier, the Long March 9 was expected to be ready for launch in 8-10 years, but a revised design is being considered. Andrew Jones reports that Long Lehao, a veteran chief designer of the Long March rocket series, presented plans for a new reusable methane-liquid oxygen launch vehicle to be ready in 2035. He described a two-stage rocket capable of launching 150 tons to low-Earth orbit. That sounds a lot like SpaceX Starship, but without mention of the launch/land pad with "chopstick" arms to capture a returning booster.

Presentation on the revised Long March 9 (source)

There is no doubt that China is paying attention to and is way behind SpaceX's Starship development. If Starship succeeds, Elon Musk may have an apartment on Mars by 2035 :-).

Update 1/25/2023

Here is confirmation of the 2035 target date for the Long March 9. By that time, several LEO broadband providers hope to have been serving customers for several years. Note the emphasis here is on deep space exploration, not Internet service. 

"Around 2035, China will implement a one-time configuration flight verification mission of heavy rockets, and after the successful mission, heavy rockets will become one of the main forces of China's deep space exploration."

当前视点！载人登月巨无霸 长征九号重型火箭将于2035年前后首飞_亚洲科技网 (smartjx.com)

Update 4/18/2023

The 14th Central Inspection Team

China Satnet is undergoing a comprehensive political "physical" (on-site?)  examination by the 14th inspection team of the Central Committee and a new General Manager has been appointed They plan to work on the investigation for about two and a half months. 

The focus of the visit is to report and reflect on violations of political discipline, organizational discipline, integrity discipline, mass discipline, work discipline, and life discipline in addition to assessing progress toward strategic goals.

To an American, that sounds a bit like 1984 but it may be routine for China. (This update was based on a Google translation).

Update July 12, 2023

The seventh test satellite was launched three days ago. The first production satellites will be launched in the third quarter of this year. 

Guowang, renamed China SatNet, will be China's global broadband provider.

In an earlier post, I described what looked like two forthcoming Chinese broadband constellations, Hongyun and Hongyan and in another post, I described a third, identified as "GW" at the time. All three were projects of state-owned enterprises China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC).

There was pushback from those contending that a broadband constellation was redundant since Chinese mobile operators China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom cover most big cities and even more sparsely populated regions like Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. On the other hand, if a constellation were built, some remote cell towers could be de-commissioned and, in my mind more important, China could serve other nations as part of its Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative. Chinese authorities are aware of the constellations of SpaceX and others, and China would have an economic and political advantage over them in nations with Belt and Road projects. (It is noteworthy that a third of this 2018 presentation on the Chinese Spatial Information Corridor is devoted to explaining "How the corridor contributes to the space capacity building of developing countries").

The decision has been made. CASC's GW (Guo Wang) will be China's global broadband service provider and the constellation is tentatively named "Starnet." (I've seen "Guo Wang" written as Guowang and translated as "national grid" and as "national network"). Speaking at one of the two major conferences that review Chinese five-year plans, Bao Weimin, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and director of the CASC Science and Technology Committee, said that “We are planning and developing space Internet satellites and launching experiments. For satellites, the state will also set up a Guo Wang "state grid" company to be responsible for the overall planning and operation of space Internet construction."

China's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for National Economic and Social Development and Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035 were adopted this month and, as China space expert Blaine Curcio points out they call for building an integrated communications, Earth observation, and satellite navigation system with global coverage. The Chinese already have navigation and Earth observation satellites and it sounds like Starnet will be the communication component. Curcio was not surprised by the inclusion of these space goals in the five-year plan since it was foreshadowed by both the Belt and Road Spacial Information Corridor (see the essay beginning on page 19 of this report) and Made in China 2025 initiatives. He also speculated that Hongyan might be responsible for some of the eight Guowang sub-constellations.

Elon Musk has been quoted as saying his goal for Starlink is to avoid bankruptcy and OneWeb's Sunil Bharti Mittal says that "two satellite constellations in LEO will be enough, perhaps there might be space for three, but definitely not for four." I don't know about his prediction, but in spite of being behind the others -- SpaceX is offering service and OneWeb plans to do so next year -- Guowang, with the backing of the Chinese government and an edge in Belt and Road nations, seems a pretty safe bet to be around for a long time.

Update 4/5/2021

Here is a link to China's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and here is a non-editable Microsoft translation and here is an editable version. If you speak Spanish and can improve the translation, this version is editable. (To make edits, contact me for the password).

Update 4/30/2021

GuoWang, renamed China Starnet, will be funded by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), which according to China-space expert Blaine Curcio, is a major change. Curcio says "the project will have significantly greater autonomy than if it were a sort of subsidiary of CASC/CETC/China Telecom. It is now their equal, a 4th ISP, from space."

Curico has noted that the Chinese are generally more familiar with our space program than we are with theirs and it seems that this constellation is a response to SpaceX Starlink. Guowang plans 12,992 satellites and SpaceX has authorization for 12,000 and their planned orbits are similar to those of Starlink before they received permission to lower the orbits of many of their satellites earlier this week.

Update 5/18/2021

The name of this constellation keeps changing. First it was "GW" then "Gwowang". An article in Axios called the new name "China Star Network" and Asia Times "Starnet." I asked Blaine Curcio, a Chinese space consultant and co-host of the Dongfang Hour Podcast about the new name and he said he that 中国星网 is the name that will stick. (Type that into Google Translate and you get "China Star Network"). Now he's written a post calling it "China SatNet." I will go with that for now, but we need an agreed-upon name for search engines. The post also gives brief biographies of the three senior people who will be leading the project.

Update 6/9/2021

Andrew Jones reports that Oriental Space, a new Chinese commercial launch company focused on expendable and reusable launchers, has been formed and is planning on commercial crew flights and eventually planetary exploration. That sounds a lot like a SpaceX clone. 

Oriental Space was jointly founded by "a senior aerospace technology team and successful technology entrepreneurs" and has completed a 400 million yuan angel round led by Jingwei and Sequoia China and a host of other companies and entrepreneurs.

This may be the answer to the question "how can Starnet/GwoWang launch 12,992 broadband satellites without hiring SpaceX?"

Update 7/8/2021

To compete with SpaceX Starlink, state-owned China Satnet will work with private companies, several of which, LandSpace, Commsat, Galaxy Space, and i-Space, are highlit in this inciteful post.

As with US Cities and States, Chinese municipal and provincial governments often work with companies. China SatNet and the City of Chongqing have signed a cooperation agreement, whereby China SatNet will try to leverage some existing projects and assets in Chongqing. Those existing projects and assets are probably from the planned 320-satellite Hongyan constellation, which seems to have been superseded by SatNet.

For more on locations and local resources that SatNnet is considering, the growing importance of the commercial space sector in China, Chinese awareness of SpaceX Starlink, the importance of Chinese self-sufficiency, and an example of a SatNet application in the Belt and Road infrastructure project check out this segment of the Dongfang Hour podcast.

Update 2/3/2022

What's in a name?

I've been inconsistent in trying to figure out what to call GuoWang and China SatNet and Curcio brought some clarity in this article. He says China Satellite Network Corporation Limited, or China SatNet for short, is a high-level, state-owned company with significant autonomy over procurement, administration, and other decisions. It is at the same level of the state-owned enterprise hierarchy as space industry giants CASC and CASIC, as well as the three telcos.

That's clear and after reading it, I figured GuoWang (国家网络 in Chinese, which Google translates as "national network") would then be the name of the constellation owned by China SatNet -- like Starlink is a constellation owned by SpaceX, but Curcio says that is not the case -- "I think right now Guowang remains a nebulous concept of a “Chinese mega constellation”, whereas SatNet is an organization today with subsidiaries focused on satellite applications, equipment, etc. It’s still not clear whether the Guowang constellation would be “owned” by SatNet."

I guess that reduces GwoWang to a generic term and the title of this post should be "SatNet will be China's Global Broadband Provider and they will probably own and operate a GuoWang that still has not been named" :-).

A new Chinese broadband satellite constellation

Can we afford the wasted capacity and idle investment of SpaceX satellites remaining dormant while flying above China and GW satellites remaining dormant while flying above the US?

In an earlier post, I described three Chinese low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations that seemed to be oriented toward broadband communication. 

• Hongyun, which plans 864 satellites and will emphasize service in China's remote regions. 
• Hongyan, which plans around 320 satellites, seems to be looking at applications like maritime, aviation, and mobile backhaul service. 
• Galaxy Space seems to be focused on 5G backhaul and Internet of things applications. 

None of those companies seem to be pursuing the global consumer market that SpaceX and OneWeb hope to serve, but a new Chinese company code-named GW, which I have been told stands Guó wang (国网) or National grid), seems to plan on doing so. 

GW has filed a spectrum application with the International Telecommunication Union for two constellations with the cryptic names GW-A59 and GW-2. They requested permission to use the following frequencies:

• 37.5-39.5 GHz (space-to-Earth)
• 39.5-42.5 GHz (space-to-Earth) 
• 47.2-50.2 GHz (Earth-to-space) 
• 50.4-51.4 GHz (Earth-to-space) 

for communication with 12,992 satellites:

The size of the constellations implies an intention to compete in the end-user broadband service market. Where might they fit in that market segment?

In a recent podcast, consultant Blaine Curcio pointed out that a long history of government infrastructure investment has left China with a strong terrestrial network. Hongyan might be able to serve much of the remaining domestic market, but with 12,992 satellites in orbits ranging from 30 to 85 degrees inclination, GW seems to be interested in the global market where they would compete with SpaceX and OneWeb. (Telesat will also compete in these markets but is focusing on mobile backhaul and hotspots for education, telemedicine, and community access).

SpaceX, which is off to the fastest end-user start, is focusing initially on the lucrative markets of North America, followed perhaps by Europe. OneWeb would seem to have an advantage in the Asian and African nations where part-owner Bharti has a presence as well as the United Kingdom due to the government's stake in the company. GW would be in a strong position in the nations where China already has "Digital Silk Road" (DSR) projects, as shown below.

DSR IT infrastructure projects as of 12/2018 (source)

The DSR is part of China's ambitions Belt and Road initiative with infrastructure projects in around 70 nations. In late 2016 they added space infrastructure -- the Belt & Road spatial Information Corridor. While they are currently concentrated in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, I've speculated that the DSR may extend to Latin America.

Over half the people in the world live in or near China and India. Many of those have no connectivity and some are paying very high rates for geosynchronous satellite service. If the LEO satellite business works out, there is room for GW, OneWeb, SpaceX, Telesat, and others. 

I have painted a speculative picture of a politically bifurcated LEO Internet with GW serving one set of nations and SpaceX and OneWeb others, but I am certainly not endorsing that future. Satellite constellations are by definition global and we are facing massive global challenges today -- can we afford the wasted capacity and idle investment of SpaceX satellites remaining dormant while flying above China and GW satellites remaining dormant while flying above the US?

Update 3/9/2021

Bao Weimin, a Director of the Science and Technology Commission of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) has confirmed their committment to going forward with the GW LEO constellation. Chinese space expert Blaine Curcio said that while no details were released in the announcement other than "we will build a GW," official recognition is big news.