Aero & Space Weekly News Round-Up - Ep.7 (9th - 15th Nov. 2020)
Welcome to episode 7 of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup, covering the period of November 9 to 15! In this week's episode, we bring you the following bits of Chinese space news:
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:
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. According to another article from CGWIC, the DFH-3E has a launch mass of 3200kg, which is ~60% of the size of a standard GEO satellite. The satellite delivery is to occur by 31 August 2023. The satellite will be used to “provide telecommunications services in the Asia-Pacific region”. Noteworthily, some sources quoted the satellite as being ~1300kg instead. This would make more sense, as the LM-2C, the LV selected for the launch, has a maximum payload to GTO of about ~1300 kg. The official APT Satellite regulatory filing did not specify a mass for the satellite.
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) recent article discussing them. We know that Freedom Star is developing a solid rocket, and that they recently completed engine tests.
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”. 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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