China Aero & Space Weekly News Round-Up - Episode 7 (9th - 15th Nov. 2020)

Hello and welcome to episode 7 of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup, covering the period of November 9 to 15! This week's stories include:

0:00 Welcome and news summary
0:54 Long March-6 Launch
11:17 APT Satellite small GEO order
15:38 Emergence of Xi'an Freedom Star
19:46 China High-Tech Fair

1) Long March 6 launch
November 6 saw a LM-6 launch with 13x satellites. This was admittedly last week, but heck, we had a lot of stuff last week, and there’s a lot to unpack here. The official CASC press release mentions 13 satellites, of which 10 were for Satellogic, 1x was for the Northwest Polytechnical University, 1x was a satellite jointly built by MinoSpace, ADASpace, and UESTC, and 1x was a satellite for Beihang, Spacety, and Thrustme. There were several noteworthy elements here:
- 10x satellites for Satellogic. Satellogic is an Argentinian commercial EO startup with longtime links to China. One of the company's biggest financial backers is Chinese tech behemoth Tencent, with the latter having led Satellogic’s recent Series B round. Satellogic has parlayed its China connections into at least one contract in China, with the government of Henan province and a Chinese partner.
http://www.spacechina.com/n25/n2014789/n2014804/c3038529/content.html

- The MinoSpace/ADASpace/UESTC satellite represents an example of a company with significant support from Chengdu government (ADASpace) partnering with a major research university in Chengdu (UESTC) and a more advanced smallsat manufacturer (MinoSpace). The satellite launch was later publicized by UESTC as a 6G test satellite. Noteworthily, CETC, another major SOE that is known to be the main contractor of 天地一体化 has a major presence in Chengdu.
https://www.sohu.com/a/430968005_466840

- The Spacety/Thrustme satellite is a good example of cooperation between Chinese and western space companies. It is not entirely clear, but from our perspective, the language implies that Spacety coordinated several payloads from Thrustme, Beihang, and others, and that Spacety was likely paid by Thrustme for space on the satellite platform.
https://bit.ly/38H9r2t

2) APT Satellite Small GEO Order
APT Satellite of Hong Kong ordered a small GEO from CGWIC earlier this month. The small GEO is based on the DFH-3E platform and will launch on a Long March 2C, manufactured by CAST. While they are right to say it’s smaller than, say, the DFH-4, the DFH-3E is not really a “small GEO” to the extent that say Astranis or Saturn are small GEOs. While Astranis and Saturn are building small GEOs that are some hundreds of kg, the DFH-3E is closer in size to a regular satellite, but with electric propulsion and a smaller payload.
https://www.apstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2020110600378.pdf

3) Emergence of Xi’an Ziyou Xingchen Tech Company
This week saw the emergence of Xi’an Ziyou Xingchen Tech Co. (aka. Freedom Star) The company seems to not have an official website, and we only learned about them through the China Space News (中国航天报) WeChat account and a recent article written about them. We know that Freedom Star is developing a solid rocket, and that they recently completed engine tests.

The company is the latest to emerge from Xi’an/Shaanxi Province, a major city in Northwest China. Thus far, we have seen S-Motor, Deep Blue Aerospace, Casspace, AASpace, and others set up operations in Xi’an or Tongchuan, two cities in central Shaanxi Province.
https://bit.ly/2Ur92Zw

4) China Hi-Tech Fair
Last week saw the China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen. Our correspondent LAN Tianyi was in attendance, and provided us with some interesting tidbits. In particular, we saw some results from the Galaxy Space “5G Broadband test satellite”, namely speeds of 48 Gbps on the satellite, terminal speeds of 1.5 Gbps, and a 382 Mbps 5G network created using the test satellite. Similar to Xingyun and Hongyun, it appears that Galaxy Space is making some impressive strides in application development using only a single test satellite.

This has been another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup. Thanks for watching!

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Видео China Aero & Space Weekly News Round-Up - Episode 7 (9th - 15th Nov. 2020) канала Dongfang Hour