By: Blaine Curcio, China Space Monitor
As deployment of a “Chinese version of Starlink” ramps up, launch is becoming a bigger question mark. It’s true that state-owned CASC has reached a steady launch state of ~1 launch per week for a couple of years, but most of these launches are spoken for: Yaogan and Gaofen remote sensing, BeiDou navigation, China Space Station, Lunar missions, and a whole bunch of science and technology satellites.
Therefore, if China wants to launch hundreds or thousands of NGSO broadband satellites per year, CASC will need to master reusability and/or ramp up production, or, a bunch of big commercial launchers need to hit the market. CASC is working slowly but surely towards reusability, and thus far, commercial launchers haven’t been able to step up and launch batches of NGSO comms satellites. But this is changing.
The State of Play Today
China’s commercial launch companies have thus far fallen short in serving SpaceSail and SatNet, the nation’s two leading NGSO comms megaconstellations. As covered in February’s China Space Monitor, SpaceSail published a tender for 9 launches of 162 satellites, and had to re-publish and ultimately cancel because only state-owned CALT and SAST submitted bids. The record for satellites launched on a single commercial rocket comes from a June 2023 CAS Space launch of 26 satellites, likely weighing an average of ~50kg each. For the larger (~300kg) SpaceSail satellites, you’re gonna need a bigger boat (or rocket).
And so for now, all 5 SpaceSail and both SatNet launches have been launched on Long March rockets (LM-5B, LM-6A, LM-8A). In the meantime, China’s leading commercial launchers have been perfecting relatively smaller rockets. The most prolific thus far is unquestionably Galactic Energy, which has attempted 17 launches of their Ceres-1 small rocket and succeeded in 16 of them.
A number of medium-lift commercial launch vehicles are set to debut this year, including the Zhuque-3, Tianlong-3, and the Ceres-2, which will eventually relieve the bottleneck (and probably create oversupply, but that’s another story), but which will also take some time to establish reliability and credibility. Bringing us back to our original point: there’s still a launch bottleneck for China’s constellations, and the market sees it.
What is the Market Doing?
The past few weeks (and months) have seen a flurry of big funding rounds for the leading commercial launch vehicles amidst broader state support. To now, it seems that regulators got ahead of themselves supporting NGSO constellation deregulation ~18 months ago, having done so without first making it possible to have the launch infrastructure. It seems that the market is now recognizing this issue, and pouring in funding amidst apparent state support.
On the funding side, the past few weeks saw Deep Blue Aerospace complete a “nearly ¥500M” B4 funding round, this just days after iSpace completed a “hundreds of millions of dollars” round. Just a few months ago in December, we saw a massive ¥900M round by Landspace. Most of these rounds have involved at least one provincial or city-level government, typically providing investment in exchange for the company building a factory or other infrastructure in their city or province.
As the rounds get bigger and valuations increase, private capital is typically crowded out, as has been the case with the well-established launchers. Private capital has found a second wave of smaller companies focusing on specific technologies, such as CosmoLeap (stainless steel rockets and chopstick-style towers), HXServo (rocket servo systems), and RSpace (rocket engines), all of whom have completed relatively smaller funding rounds recently, typically subscribed by private VC.
On the state support side, banks have apparently been getting signals to open up more credit to launch and commercial space more broadly. Best I can tell there has been no directly relevant announcement about space, but the government has shown broader support for the tech sector. The past couple of weeks saw two banks: Bank of Shanghai and Zhejiang Commercial Bank, were featured in pieces with very similar headlines about their “helping to finance the Chinese commercial response to SpaceX”, in the case of Zhejiang Commercial Bank, their support for the sector includes a ¥50M, 10-year loan to Landspace finalized in Feb 2025, for which the bank notes that “According to ZCB’s technology financial support policy, special interest rate discounts are given to enterprises”.
All this is to say, while there is a shortage of launch capacity in China today, this likely won’t last forever, with several CASC rockets moving slowly but surely towards reusability, and with commercial launch companies raising funding and ramping up capacity. This infrastructure will, for the coming couple of years, likely be soaked up by state missions, Thousand Sails, and eventually some Guowang satellites. But sometime in the late 2020s, we may see the balance tip the other way, with many Chinese commercial launch companies reaching batch production and reusability, alongside a technologically re-vamped Long March production lineup.
This could lead to Chinese rocket capacity being dumped into foreign markets, capturing international launch demand and contributing to Government goals of increasing their share of the global space market, but could also lower the cost and increase the options for access to space among a wide array of entities.
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