China has never hidden its intention to attack Starlink head-on, Elon Musk’s service that provides access to the Internet via satellite. The country will begin to put its own into orbit: war has therefore been officially declared, and it will take place in low Earth orbit.
Star Wars will indeed take place, but in this one, there will be no Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker: instead of the Empire and the Rebellion, it will be SpaceX and Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST) who will face off in space… and more precisely in low Earth orbit, where thousands of small satellites are already orbiting.
Indeed, China takes a very dim view of the massive deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite program. Unsurprisingly, the Middle Kingdom has decided to launch its own program, initially named G60 Starlink. Now, it is called Qianfen, but it is clear that the idea is to openly oppose Elon Musk’s initiative.
12,000 Chinese satellites planned SSST’s satellites have been under construction in its factory since December 2023. The first launch into space is scheduled for August 2024: 18 satellites will initially be deployed via a Long March A6 rocket that will take off from the Taiyuan launch pad in northern China. Other launches will take place by the end of the year, as the goal is to put 108 satellites into orbit in 2024.
However, this is clearly just the beginning for China, since the SSST constellation is expected to consist of around 12,000 satellites in the long term. However, the first phase has 1,296 satellites, meaning that it will take many years to complete this project. It should also be noted that this is not the only initiative of this type in China: another project, called Guowang, aims to develop a constellation of 13,000 satellites. This means that there will hypothetically be 25,000 Chinese satellites orbiting the planet in low Earth orbit in a few years.
Serious traffic jams to be expected For its part, Starlink already had 4,700 operational satellites by the end of 2023. Elon Musk’s company plans to have 12,000 by the end of 2025 and aims to deploy 42,000 in total. This should be added to other similar projects, such as Iris2 in Europe, if it manages to find the necessary funding.
We can clearly count on the fact that the coming decades will see the deployment of satellites in low Earth orbit multiply. Many countries want, in fact, to have their own secure satellite connection system. But this could well be to the detriment of observation of the sky and space, because with these tens of thousands of devices orbiting 2,000 kilometers above the ground, it will end up being difficult to observe anything else by looking up at the stars.
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