CHINA last week launched a carrier rocket from the country’s first launch site built for commercial missions, sending two experimental satellites into their planned orbits.

The successful takeoff of the Long March-12 on its maiden flight from the Hainan commercial spacecraft launch site Nov. 30 is a good start for the entire sector, according to a commercial aerospace industry insider.

The Hainan commercial spacecraft launch site is built to support large-scale and high-density launches. Long March-12 is ready for high-frequency launches, said experts from China Aerospace Science and Technology, the main contractor for the country’s space program, as quoted by Yicai.

One of the experimental satellites, developed by GalaxySpace, a manufacturer of low Earth orbit satellites for the commercial space sector, is for satellite internet service. This technology is based on satellite communication, which forms a large-scale network by launching a certain number of satellites to provide broadband internet access and other telecom services to ground and air terminals.

GalaxySpace will accelerate the development of core technologies for satellites directly connected to smartphones, as well as the mass production of satellites and various key equipment, according to Zhu Zhengxian, chief technology officer of the Beijing-based company.

“With the continuously improving carrying capacity and the constantly increasing number of launch sites, the commercial space industry will develop at a faster pace,” Zhu said.

The premise of satellite networking is to deploy satellites into low Earth orbit at lower costs and higher efficiency, but orbit resources are limited.

The United States had 50,626 low-orbit satellites as of April 2022, according to data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The most developed among those is SpaceX’s Starlink.

Spectrum allocation filings submitted to the ITU by China in September 2020 revealed plans to construct two low Earth orbit constellations totaling 12,992 satellites.

In July last year, the Long March-2C carrier rocket launched a satellite internet service test satellite.(SD-Agencies)