Hello and welcome to another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup! Without further ado, the news update from the week of 22-28 March.

1) An ambitious deployment plan laid out by CGSTL
CGSTL, China’s leading commercial EO company which operates the Jilin-1 constellation (and manufactures its satellite in-house), announced that they would complete their 138-satellite Jilin-1 constellation during the 14th Five Year Plan, which started this year (2021-2025). This comes in the context of the recent closing of the two-sessions, with much information being revealed notably on the space roadmap for the coming 5 years.

Perhaps more interestingly, CGSTL also announced that they would have 60 Jilin-1 satellites in orbit by the end of the year, which is a very ambitious deployment schedule considering that they currently have 25 Jilin satellites in orbit (basically it would be a +150% increase in the number of satellites). Yet this is not necessarily surprising has CGSTL has been one of the lead commercial companies in China, raising significant amounts of money (2.46B RMB in 2020), and has developed increasingly impressive satellites, including the impressive 1.25t KF-01 satellite launched in Jan. 2020. They now “have the money and the technology”, and are entering a batch production and deployment phase, according to the ChinaNews outlet in Sept 2020.

2) Media report on the quality control at Xingyun
Media report originally from China Space News (中国航天报) about CASIC’s narrowband constellation project Xingyun, with the article focusing on quality control, but revealing some insights on company structure and philosophy.

Xiang Bin, Deputy GM of Xingyun Company, is interviewed during the media piece, where he discussed standardization of the Xingyun satellite platform and the quality considerations therein. Xiang noted that the quality considerations for commercial space are, in his opinion, even higher than for traditional space in some ways, because commercial space moves much faster and leapfrogs some steps in the development process. The article also pointed out that Xingyun was aiming to reduce costs mainly through design costs, highlighting an interesting difference in philosophy--namely that in traditional space, there is a lot of effort devoted to designing to the standard/specification, whereas in commercial space, they design from scratch, basically they do not try to reach a specification, they try to do things as simply as possible from the beginning of the process.

3) Beijing Daxing Aerospace Base
The Beijing municipality’s Aerospace Department director Ai Bin visited an area in Daxing district, where he confirmed that the municipality was planning to build an aerospace base. An aerospace base basically means building and providing facilities to space startups, and concentrating similar companies in one place, sometimes providing investment, incubation, etc.

4) Haisi-1 Ever Given Shot
This week saw the most captivating shipping industry news in years, with the MV Ever Given, operated by Evergreen Marine, ran aground in the Suez Canal in Egypt. As of 28 March, the ship is still stuck, blocking traffic in one of the world’s busiest canals.

5) 2 New Tianwen-1 Mars Shots
CNSA released 2 new images of Mars, shot by the Tianwen-1 spacecraft’s medium-resolution camera. The shot was taken at approx. 11 000 km distance from the surface. These two shots show the northern and southern hemispheres.

This has been another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup. We look forward to seeing you next time!

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