China orbits first Guowang Internet satellites, with thousands more to come

The first batch of Internet satellites for China's Guowang megaconstellation launched Monday on the country's heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket. The satellites are the first of up to 13,000 spacecraft a consortium of Chinese companies plans to build and launch over the next decade. The Guowang fleet will beam low-latency high-speed Internet signals in an architecture similar to SpaceX's Starlink network, although Chinese officials haven't laid out any specifics, such as target markets, service specifications, or user terminals. The Long March 5B rocket took off from Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, at 5:00 am EST (10:00 UTC) Monday. Ten liquid-fueled engines powered the rocket off the ground with 2.4 million pounds of thrust, steering the Long March 5B on a course south from Wenchang into a polar orbit. After shedding four strap-on boosters and the core stage, the rocket's Yuanzheng 2 upper stage ignited to maneuver into the targeted orbit for payload separation. The mission delivered 10 Guowang satellites into an orbit roughly 680 miles (1,100 kilometers) above the Earth, with an inclination of 86.5 degrees to the equator, according to publicly available US military tracking data. The Long March 5B's large core stage, which entered orbit on the rocket's previous missions and triggered concerns about falling space debris, fell into a predetermined location in the sea downrange from the launch site. The difference for this mission was the addition of the Yuanzheng 2 upper stage, which gave the rocket's payloads the extra oomph they needed to reach orbit.

What we (don’t) know

China has published scant details about the design of the Guowang satellites, other than their intended use as broadband Internet relay stations. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said in a statement that the Guowang satellites were developed by its subsidiary, the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). Both organizations are owned by China's central government. The existence of plans for the Guowang megaconstellation have been publicly known since 2020, when China submitted spectrum allocation filings to the International Telecommunication Union. In these filings, China outlined a fleet of 12,992 satellites in low-Earth orbit, operating at a range of altitudes and orbital inclinations. Guowang, or "national network," is managed by a secretive company called China SatNet, established by the Chinese government in 2021. SatNet has released little information since its formation, and the group doesn't have a website. Marc Julienne, director of the Center for Asian Studies at the French Institute of International Relations, wrote last year that SatNet's inconspicuous presence in the public sphere "seems rather inconsistent with the ambition of the project" if it is to offer an alternative to Starlink in consumer markets, particularly in countries where Starlink is banned—like China and Russia. "The discretion surrounding China SatNet's activities could be explained by the company’s lack of maturity and organization, and perhaps by certain uncertainties regarding its technical, technological and strategic directions," Julienne wrote. There is, perhaps, another explanation. Earlier this year, China launched the first group of satellites for another megaconstellation—called Qianfan or Thousand Sails—to provide Internet connectivity from space. The Qianfan constellation is managed by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), a company backed by Shanghai's municipal government. Unlike Guowang, Chinese officials have released some basic information about the Qianfan network, which will initially consist of around 1,300 satellites but could eventually grow to some 14,000 satellites. For example, organizations involved in the Qianfan program have publicly stated how many satellites they plan to build per year, and they revealed the spacecraft have a flat-panel design, allowing them to stack on top of one another for launch, just like SpaceX's Starlink satellites.

With Starlink, SpaceX is not only serving the consumer broadband market, but the service is proving useful in military operations in Ukraine. Starlink connectivity has aided Ukrainian military forces following the Russian invasion in 2022, and Chinese officials recognize the military utility of SpaceX's network. The US military has tested Starlink services in austere conditions to evaluate the network's ability to support military operations, and the National Reconnaissance Office is using the mass-produced Starlink spacecraft platform to create its own fleet of low-altitude spy satellites. "Any nation equipped with these systems will thus have a decisive advantage over others that are not," Julienne wrote. While there are open questions about how China will use its satellite megaconstellations, their deployment will require a significant increase in the country's launch capacity, driving the development of new commercial rockets, including reusable boosters, to lower costs and increase their flight rate. The Long March 5B rocket, developed by China's incumbent state-owned launch company, is not the most cost-effective of these options. But the Long March 5B has the lift capacity to haul more Guowang satellites to orbit than any other operational Chinese rocket. It's likely future satellites for Chinese megaconstellations will fly on multiple types of rockets as more launchers come online. China has until 2032 to launch half of the Guowang constellation—6,496 satellites—according to radio spectrum regulations promulgated by the International Telecommunication Union.

A watchful eye

The military implications for Chinese networks like Guowang and Qianfan aren't lost on US Space Force leaders. Large megaconstellations like Starlink, or the future Amazon Kuiper and Guowang systems, have the advantage of being difficult to disable or destroy, compared to a single large communications satellite providing wide-area coverage. "This just is a continuation of what China's been doing now for about 20 years," said Gen. Stephen Whiting, the top general at US Space Command. "In addition to all the counter-space weapons they've built, they are building capability to enable their army, their navy, their air force, their marines, to be more lethal, more precise, and more far-ranging." "We've seen hundreds of (surveillance) satellites, and now it seems like they're launching this proliferated, low-Earth orbit constellation to give them global communications to enable their operations on a broader scale," Whiting said. "Certainly, it's something we'll be watching to see how that develops. But it's just a continuation of the breathtaking speed at which they've been moving in space." Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of US Space Forces in the Indo-Pacific region, said he is most interested in seeing how China integrates constellations like Guowang into their military operations. China is conducting increasingly "elaborate and complex" military exercises, Mastalir said, and US commanders will assess if, and how, China incorporates the global communications capabilities of Guowang into future exercises. "Seeing how they integrate space across that exercise regime is something that we'll be watching very closely in terms of assessing the relative success of their megaconstellation," Mastalir said.

In response to questions from Ars at last week's Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida, Whiting said Space Command will track the deployment of the Chinese satellite constellations, just as they do other fleets, like Starlink. The difference is SpaceX, with more than 6,800 Starlink satellites currently in orbit, sends information on its launch schedules and spacecraft positions to Space Command, essentially giving the military a heads-up to know where to look as they track orbital traffic. China does not do the same for its satellites. Space Command currently monitors around 47,000 objects in orbit and screens them for risk of collisions. If there's going to be a close encounter between two active satellites, Space Command informs their operators. "When we see that there's going to be what we call a conjunction, we send that information off, and we continue to do that with China," Whiting said. "We do not get regular communications back. There have been a couple times over the last year where they reached out through various ways to give us heads-up about some things going on in space, like a satellite re-entering, but that is not a routine, standardized way of communication." Whiting said he's not worried about the safety of so many megaconstellations coexisting in low-Earth orbit, provided their operators "follow tenets of responsible behavior." "We want to make sure that folks are doing all the right things with prediction, predictive conjunctions, and then not leaving debris in orbit, and all those kind of things," Whiting said. But still, Whiting said it would be helpful for Space Command to have a regular dialogue with China. "We think there should be a way to have space safety discussions," he said.