Is China Lagging With Its Constellations?

The Western press seems to think the country is.

The Long March 12 Y1 vehicle rolls out to the launch pad ahead of its debut mission in November 2024, carrying internet satellite technology demonstrations.

China is currently aiming to deploy several thousand satellites into low Earth orbit for a handful of internet, communication, connectivity, and computing constellations. Efforts to do so are expected to last decades as part of a broader strategy to foster and grow a commercial space sector, with the latest launch in support of the effort occurring on July 27th with a Long March 6A carrying five GuoWang satellites.

Recently, the New York Times and the South China Morning Post released reports, both on July 23rd, claiming that efforts to deploy the GuoWang and Qianfan mega-constellations are behind and will stay behind, with a good mixture of misunderstanding, anonymous quotes, and a lack of broader consideration. The reality of constellation deployments will be discussed after the two pieces.

“This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX”

To begin, the New York Times’ article, titled either “This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up With SpaceX” or “Why Isn't China Catching Up With Elon Musk’s Starlink?”. Overall, the piece is very vague and begins by stating:

“China’s two biggest networks have deployed less than 1 percent of their planned satellites … a measure of how far they are falling behind Elon Musk’s company SpaceX for dominance in space communications.”

Domicance in space communications? Nothing I’ve read from Chinese language handouts or official coverage ever mentions communications dominance (some unaffiliated amateur commentary will), in English language media the idea of this is hyped up, but it’s not real. Shortly after that, the article continues with:

“China regards Starlink as a military threat, and Chinese companies have invested heavily in two huge networks”

Maybe China does (the New York Times later cites a piece broadly considering uses of Starlink to support its point) but Starlink is an ostensibly civilian internet providing constellation, run by a for-profit company that does have military contracts with the service. I detailed this shortly after Starlink’s July 24th outage:

Starlink has been an essential part in Ukraine's warfighting capabilities, often to the point of overreliance on SpaceX, which has led Elon Musk to shut down the service periodically to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin. This reliance has led Ukrainian forces to explore alternatives if available.

Other forces possibly affected by the outage include the U.S. Army and Navy. Hundreds of Starshield spacecraft, the military version of Starlink (which may interconnect with and hide in the Starlink constellation), used by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and Space Development Agency, may have been affected too.

With regards to China backing two major internet and communications constellations at the government and provincial level, GuoWang and Qianfan, it’s due to a fundamentally different strategy. Rather than building out the constellations to generate revenue (like SpaceX), they are perceived as essential new infrastructures. As a new infrastructure, the constellations will not only provide internet services but enable 6G networks, smart autonomous ports, alongside general internet-of-things uses. With the constellations being viewed as infrastructure, it is believed that the Chinese government is willing to invest without a guaranteed return on investment.

Following the initial points is what I can only interpret as goading of Chinese companies for not yet flying reusable rockets, akin to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, ignoring that part of the reason Starlink flies so regularly is because SpaceX controls the schedules of both, and that a handful will fly later this year, followed by many next. In shortly considering China’s reusable rockets, LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 and Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3 are brought up as they are out ahead of competitors, but weirdly the Long March 8R is too, despite still being a concept based on a design (the regular Long March 8) not well suited to reuse. Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1 or CAS Space’s Kinetica-2 would have been worth a mention over it. This point also ignores that other American reusable rockets aren’t flying either; SpaceX is an anomaly in the launch market with a multi-year headstart and its own regular setbacks.

After that the article is confused about why Qianfan’s operator, Shanghai Spacesail Technologies Co Ltd, has already signed agreements with Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Malaysia, believing them to be pledges of loyalty to China (which is an insane assumption). Those agreements were signed to begin work on understanding where to utilize the constellations, along with the requirements to do so, before testing to ensure the systems work in a variety of customer environments, ahead of rolling out the internet-providing service.

To wrap up the piece, it is quickly mentioned launches are increasing, but believing that there’s not enough to meet the rules from the International Telecommunication Union, who manage satellite communication frequencies. Those rules usually require half of a constellation’s proposed satellites to be launched within five years, although extensions can and do get granted if efforts and backing to grow the constellation are evident.

But we’re not quite done with the New York Times yet, as a day later the outlet published a video based upon on the article. That video covers much of the same ground, but in repeating parts about reusable rockets, it makes the wild assumption that most Chinese launch companies are set to make the same mistakes as Space Pioneer with its Tianlong-3, which saw the vehicle escape a test stand and destroy itself in late June 2024, hindering constellation deployment. If that were true, why didn’t LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 or CAS Space’s Kinetica-2 repeat that failure?

The New York Times’ piece is very vague in its declarations around GuoWang and Qianfan, and would be marginally informative for anyone being introduced to the constellations (but they would also need to know nothing about Starlink). Unremitting praise for SpaceX’s Starlink throughout, but continuous pessimism on China’s constellation efforts is more of the outlet’s double standards on Chinese policy. The piece was also published just several weeks before China starts to fly comparable commercial launch vehicles to the West’s fleet of rockets, making a piece like this one of the few last chances to praise supposed superiority of American technology.

“Has the Qianfan satellite network – China’s Starlink rival – run into trouble?”

As for the South China Morning Post piece, titled “Has the Qianfan satellite network – China’s Starlink rival – run into trouble?”, focuses on the Shanghai-backed Qianfan internet mega-constellation is quite vague and falls short of going into any proper detail. The main content used to make the article’s point is a series of personal beliefs from a rocket engineer¹ in Beijing, kept anonymous but presumably having shown some credentials to the outlet.

Upon being introduced in the article, the engineer states that the reason China is behind in its first year of deployments is due to the lack of an equivalent to SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9, used to deploy between 23 and 28 Starlink satellites (previously almost 60) on each mission dedicated to it. The lack of reusable launch vehicles is indeed slowing Qianfan satellite deployment, but it is not the sole reason. Other reasons are issues at the new Wenchang Space Launch Site (such as propellant plumbing to the launch pads) and over-subscribed launch options (it’s hard to get to orbit if you're still in the queue). Where the Falcon 9 equivalent anecdotes goes from believable to questionable is when the engineer states that he expects this shortfall to last at least a decade, which is incredibly confusing when you consider the number of reusable rockets aiming to fly within the coming year.

Following that, there is the consideration of a launch tender to deliver 162 Qianfan satellites, in groups of 18 across nine missions, within the year, which went unfulfilled earlier this year, as under three companies bid (no details were shared). That tender required bidders to have a launch vehicle capable of carrying 4,500 kilograms to an 800-kilometer orbit, a capability largely still reserved to the Long March rockets². The engineer noted that limited options for the capability too, being quoted as saying:

“That looks like a demanding requirement to me. Only a few Long March variants produced by state-owned manufacturers can do the job. None of the main commercial rockets that technically qualify have flown successfully yet.”

What the engineer is saying is largely true, but doesn’t consider events around the bidding. Debut launch timelines have been slowly moving further along the year, limiting opportunities to fulfil the potential contract. Add this with new regulation being worked on at the same time, which companies knew of or got substantive hints of due to party members within them, it would be a possible violation of the law (likely under section seven) to apply for the contract and win it with an unproven rocket and then not fulfil it.

Lastly, there is some theorizing that the Central Government-backed GuoWang will consume launch availability that could otherwise be utilized by Qianfan. This theory is solely built upon GuoWang being state-owned and backed, ignoring that the operators of the Qianfan constellation have already signed international agreements with more on the way, along with needing time to troubleshoot some satellite issues (leading to a gap in launches).

Due to being anonymous, it’s impossible to know if the engineer has any biases, belonging to a state-owned enterprise, an established private company, or another that’s either brand new or far behind competitors. It’s also unknown if he spoke to the South China Morning Post intending to make it seem like China is further behind on constellation deployment than the country really is.

Constellation realities

While Qianfan is slightly behind on its plans (108 satellites in 2024 and 648 in 2025), and GuoWang needs to start launching larger batches for 400 satellites by 2027, regulatory extensions with the International Telecommunications Union can be applied for (if under ten percent of the proposed satellites are not in orbit by late-2029), and will probably be granted due to demonstrated activity to deploy satellites, to ensure the desired number of satellites can be launched. Work is meanwhile underway at the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site to ensure more routine constellation launches can take place without impeding other space missions (Qianfan received all Long March 6A launches between August 2024 and January 2025). And commercially operated launch vehicles are set to be flying, this time able to bid on constellation missions without breaking the law.

On a related note: a group of constellation satellites will possibly launch from Wenchang on July 30th via a Long March 8A, a Long March 12 on August 3rd, and finally on August 13th with a Long March 5B to start further launches for the remainder of the year.

It is important to remember that the first Qianfan batch was deployed in August 2024, while GuoWang started in December 2024. Despite the four-month gap in starting, both constellations have maintained consistent deployment schedules. Qianfan has deployed 90 satellites across five launches via 18-satellite batches (groups of 36 to 54 are planned with larger rockets) launched roughly every two-ish months on average, while GuoWang has maintained a more frequent launch cadence with smaller, variable batch sizes of 5 to 10 satellites so far. Considering the over-subscribed launch services, as well as it taking Amazon’s Kuiper 18 months and SpaceX 15 months to go from an initial launch to deploying groups of satellites, China’s deployment efforts are impressive so far.

Of course, there are the constellations being deployed outside of China, all privately backed and for-profit. Compared to all other space-based satellite internet and connectivity providers, SpaceX is unique due to the company’s synergy of having both Starlink and Falcon 9. This allows for more frequent additions to the constellation, with at least one launch per week, as SpaceX controls the production and schedules for both. This is something no other constellation operator or launch provider has, and led to Starlink having around 8,000 satellites in orbit and several million customers, civilian and government.

Although most similar to Qianfan and GuoWang in the West are Amazon’s Kuiper constellation and Eutelsat’s OneWeb, as both aim or aimed to launch hundreds of satellites per year without possessing a launch vehicle operated internally. Kuiper aims to provide internet services via up to 3,236 satellites, with 78 spacecraft in orbit so far, by 24 deployed by a Falcon 9 and two groups of 27 launched by Atlas V. At the moment, Kuiper needs around 1,600 satellites launched by mid-2026 to meet regulatory deadlines, but will likely apply for an extension. OneWeb, on the other hand, has completed its initial constellation of around 650 satellites (launched over four years) to focus on providing connectivity services to businesses, with plans to upgrade services by 2028. As is evident by Kuiper and OneWeb, not having an in-house launch option and needing to share few launch services leads to much slower deployments.

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1. Referred to as either ‘the engineer’ or ‘he’.

2. Like the Long March 6A, Long March 8, Long March 8A, Long March 12, or Long March 3C.