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Welcome to another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup! This week we bring you updates on Galactic Energy, China’s maritime satcom industry and the product offerings therein, and China’s role in the regional EO market.

1) Galactic Energy completed a RMB 200 million Series A funding round in September, a round that was announced last week. This is the company’s first round in ~11 months, having raised RMB 150M in Oct 2019. The company has now raised ~RMB 500 million across 4 rounds, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that they were founded just under 3 years ago. Funding will go towards accelerating the development of the company’s Pallas-1 and Ceres-1 rockets. Galactic Energy is now quite likely one of the top 4 commercial launch companies in China, along with Landspace, iSpace, and Expace.

This status in the “Big Four’ of China’s commercial launch sector was enhanced just a couple of days ago, when on November 7th 2020, Galactic Energy held the inaugural launch of its solid rocket the Ceres-1, becoming the 2nd private company in China to put a satellite into orbit after iSpace. Ceres-1, much like iSpace’s Hyperbola-1, is a small rocket with a capacity of 350 kg into LEO. While similar in propulsion technology, there are some definite slight differences between the two rockets (separation method, attitude control). Galactic Energy’s inaugural launch on the 7th was also noteworthy in that it was commercial, with the Ceres-1 rocket launching the Tianqi-11 satellite for Guodian Gaoke, a satellite manufacturer that plans to launch and operate the Tianqi constellation. 

2) In the maritime space, we saw announced this week that the CASIC 2nd Academy, in partnership with the China Unicom Research Institute and the government of Zhoushan City, Zhejiang Province, completed China’s first “Low Orbit Broadband Satellite + 5G Maritime” test. While the article, which was originally published by the CASIC 2nd academy, does not explicitly mention Hongyun, the phrasing of LEO broadband satellite would almost certainly imply that the tests were using the Hongyun test satellite, launched in late 2018.
Separately, as part of China’s 11/11 “Singles Day”, a huge online shopping day, we saw SinoSat release its 11/11 promotions for its Haixingtong maritime satcom service, which included 200MB of free data upon signing up, RMB 800 per year for unlimited voice. SinoSat is a ChinaSat subsidiary with focus on several high-value verticals with global requirements, i.e. maritime satcom, and has been building out a maritime satcom service for several years using satellite capacity from ChinaSat among others.

3) Finally, the Asia-Oceania Group on Earth Observations (AO GEO) held a meeting in Changzhou early in the week. The event was attended by 15 countries and several international organizations. “China is playing an important role in the Asia-Oceania region, with the second highest number of remote sensing satellites in the world and its application of Earth observation shifting from experimental use to business services”, said Wang Qi’an, the director of the National Remote Sensing Center of China

This has been another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup. If you’ve made it this far, we thank you for your kind attention, and look forward to seeing you next time! 

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