Building China’s Two Starlinks

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Paddy Stephens writes about space, security, and energy for The Wire China, Resilience Media and others. He’s based between London, Nice and Taipei. This is Part 2 of his two-part investigation of China’s Starlink challengers! In the first part of this article on China’s responses to Starlink, I analyzed how China views the megaconstellation, and how it might try to disable it in a conflict. This second part reports on China’s mixed record and recent success in building not one but two major low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite megaconstellations of its own. The Chinese government understands Starlink as both a commercial company and a national security asset for the US and partners. Over time, two major ‘Chinese Starlink’ projects have emerged, which between them cover both aspects: Guowang (国网 — literally, “National Network”), a satellite infrastructure provider primarily for the state, and commercially-oriented Qianfan (千帆 — literally, “Thousand Sails”). First to emerge was Guowang, which serves the Chinese state, including the military. It is highly secretive, mentioned by name in few Chinese public policy documents, and public information about it remains scarce. China SatNet 中国星网, the Xiong’an-based state-owned enterprise (SOE) responsible for Guowang, seems to be working closely with the military-industrial complex and state telecommunications companies. The most obvious evidence for this, says Curcio, is China Space Time 中国时空信息集团有限公司, a joint venture between China SatNet, China Mobile, and NORINCO 北方工业, a state-owned defense contractor. There are indications that Guowang is offering much more than just satellite broadband. Aerospace China 中国航天, a publication supervised by aerospace SOE behemoth China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) — itself with at least one subsidiary building satellites for Guowang — wrote in August 2024 that Guowang “is capable of carrying broadband communication payloads, laser communication payloads, synthetic aperture radar payloads, optical remote sensing payloads, and various other payload types”. CSIS assessments back this up, as do other limited pieces of evidence. In February 2024, when the system was still in a preliminary test phase and its coverage remained sporadic, Taiwanese media reported that three Chinese coast guard ships were helping the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) test Guowang close to Taiwan to provide information for future precision strikes by the Rocket Force. According to the plan filed with the ITU in 2020, Guowang aims to have 12,992 satellites operating at altitudes of 500-600 km and 1145km, where latency is low, but the system also has at least three satellites in the much higher geostationary orbit, offering wide and stable coverage. Estimates of the mass of the satellites, which has not been publicly disclosed, put it at almost 1,000 kg; some argue it could be significantly heavier than that, making it abnormally heavy for a communications satellite and indicating it may have other payloads on board. Compared to its lofty ambitions as a Chinese Starlink, the pace of Guowang’s progress from 2020 to 2023 was glacial. By the start of 2024, Guowang had managed to launch just 15 satellites to test the system’s capabilities. Starlink launched almost 2,000 satellites in 2023 alone. There were a few reasons for this. Until mid-2022, Starlink had not been used extensively on the battlefield and had few commercial subscribers, so pressure to build an alternative was initially low. Similar projects elsewhere have also faced delays — Europe’s IRIS and Amazon LEO (formerly Project Kuiper) are behind schedule too. But there were other factors unique to Guowang. Ineffective leadership may have played a role. Many of the decisionmakers were sexagenarian Party types who had spent their careers in China’s plodding, predictable aerospace SOEs — hardly the best people to lead a project trying to keep pace with the world’s most successful space company. China SatNet, the company which runs Guowang, was announced as a target for investigation in March 2023 and its general manager was removed the following month. Meanwhile, China’s space SOEs were producing few big rockets capable of delivering large numbers of heavy Guowang satellites into LEO, and most of these were already spoken for by other state missions. China’s fledgling commercial rocket companies did not have any big launchers to offer Guowang at this point either. Ultimately, the effective monopoly on LEO comms satellites that China SatNet was given from April 2021 was clearly not the right model for building an equivalent to Starlink. “When there was only one entity, they just didn’t do anything for three years”, said Curcio bluntly. “I think the government realized there needed to be some competition, and so started supporting two projects. Qianfan had been there in the shadows for a long time.” In October 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) ended Guowang’s monopoly, allowing non-SOEs to enter the satellite internet industry. Enter Qianfan The murky backstory for Qianfan actually starts in 2017 with the creation of KLEO Connect. Core to this Sino-German joint venture was (what would later be known as) Shanghai government-backed Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), which, using the German side’s spectrum rights, aimed to build a rival to Starlink. Instead, the venture ended in acrimony and lawsuits after the Chinese side launched two satellites in August 2021 for a separate constellation that the German side said matched the planned KLEO Connect constellation in technical specifications and other details. After the joint venture broke down, in November 2021 construction began on a factory in the G60 Science and Tech Corridor in Shanghai, SSST’s base in Songjiang District, to build a new “G60 Starlink”. Having lost access to KLEO Connect’s spectrum, G60 also quietly filed for new rights in April 2023. All of this was going on from 2021 to 2023, the years in which Guowang had a monopoly on satellite internet. G60 Starlink quietly developed, but its prospects were unclear. But when MIIT ended Guowang’s monopoly in October 2023, the Shanghai constellation — under a new name, Qianfan — was ready to move quickly. In November 2023, the Shanghai government announced the new LEO Qianfan constellation as part of its Action Plan for Promoting Commercial Space. In February 2024, Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST) — backed by the Shanghai government and affiliates of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) — raised the 6.7bn yuan it needed for the construction of a new LEO megaconstellation, mostly from state funding bodies. In August it launched its first satellite; despite some operational problems in late 2024 when its satellites were struggling to reach their target orbit, by February 2025 it had 76 working satellites in orbit (by then Guowang’s fleet had crept up to 38, following the constellation’s first operational launch in December). In contrast to Guowang, Qianfan is fundamentally a state project of Shanghai, long a key satellite manufacturing center. The Shanghai government owns the majority of SpaceSail; in 2025, 66% of SpaceSail’s operator SSST was owned by two of the Shanghai government’s investment funds. One of these funds, Shanghai Alliance Investment, together with affiliates of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, own the main Qianfan satellite manufacturer, Genesat, and much of the local space ecosystem that feeds into it. Despite its murky origins, with its recent growth, Qianfan clearly now has fans in Beijing working to remove barriers to its growth. Although Guowang’s monopoly technically ended in 2023, for two years non-SOEs lacked a regulatory framework to operate. A striking illustration came in January 2025, when a cruise ship demonstrating Qianfan connected only after entering Hong Kong waters, because it did not yet have market access on the mainland. But regulatory changes starting in April 2025 have allowed and actively encouraged growth in the sector. Most notably, a August 2025 MIIT Opinion offered a framework for commercial companies to satellite internet to commercial companies, and Qianfan has now been tested at different locations in mainland China. In August of this year, central government fund Guodiao Phase II Collaborative Development Fund 国调二期协同发展基金股份有限公司 invested 5.76bn RMB in the project, which Curcio describes as an “important endorsement” from the central government. A key difference with Guowang is its transparency. As one analyst, who wished to remain unnamed, told me, “we know for certain that Qianfan is not a military system, because there’s plenty of information available about it.” That allows it to work with foreign telecomms companies on network development, crucial to its overseas ambitions. Its technology is impressive. According to reports, Qianfan terminals showcased at the 2026 Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, are capable of providing download speeds of up to 450 Mbps and upload speeds of 150 Mbps, above the median in Hong Kong. The company says it has started to offer basic connectivity services to maritime users, supporting connection of automatic identification systems. In 2025, SpaceSail, which owns it, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Airbus to integrate Qianfan onto the company’s planes — though the company has indicated this might be limited to China-based airlines. Qianfan also has cooperation agreements with Turkey’s state-owned satellite comms monopoly, has been tested in Kazakhstan, and has an MOU with Malaysia’s national satellite operator Measat. Brazil will be the first country after China where its services are widely available, after an approval in March by Brazil’s telecomms agency to provide services to the country. Is two better than one? The main benefit of having a fairly transparent, commercially-oriented equivalent to Starlink alongside Guowang is that it can expand abroad, competing with Musk’s company. And analysts believe a kind of rivalry has formed, spurring them both on — just as the government had hoped. Dr Lucie Sénéchal-Perrouault, who researches Chinese commercial space activities, told me: “The central government used the competition between Qianfan and Guowang to accelerate their development. They pushed each other to be better”. Both Qianfan and Guowang have made clear progress this year. As a new leadership cohort was brought in between April and June 2025 — a decade younger than the previous — Guowang seems less cautious and more focused on deployment frequency, and now has 238 working satellites. Qianfan has had a remarkable surge: of its 217 working satellites in orbit, 151 were launched since the start of April. The deal to provide services to Brazil next year seems to be spurring the company to deploy faster, while the increased availability of rockets in China, including a few commercial successes, is making it easier to secure launches. But though they have accelerated satellite deployment, progress still remains too slow. From Qianfan’s publicly available specs, it is possible to analyze its coverage. Technically, it is already capable of providing continuous global connectivity, meaning it can offer services to Brazil. But with its current number of satellites, bandwidth remains very low. According to calculations from Non-GEO Constellations Analysis Toolkit (NCAT) based on data from the constellation’s ITU filing, Qianfan has upwards of 200 Gbps of aggregate usable capacity available across Brazil — enough for tens of thousands of users. Data from NCAT states that Starlink has roughly 65 times that available in the country — 13 Tbps. It’s more difficult to estimate Guowang’s coverage because of the limited information available. But the same point applies: the constellation’s low number of satellites likely means that its bandwidth remains low relative to its ambitions, limiting its current applications and strategic utility. And the low number of satellites launched is a problem for other reasons. ITU rules require constellations to reach certain launch milestones or risk losing access to the orbital slots and spectrum rights they have. Qianfan missed a modest (seemingly self-imposed) goal of 324 satellites by July 2026. Guowang looks likely to miss its target of 400 satellites in orbit by 2027. China will need to launch 10% of the planned total for Guowang — 1299 — by September 2029 or risk losing access to the spectrum. It’s way behind schedule. The rocket problem Trying to realise this model of two LEO megaconstellations has one obvious challenge. China’s current annual launch capacity may be as much as 500 satellites a year; each of these megaconstellations is aiming for more than ten thousand satellites in orbit. To build just one of that kind of megaconstellation — let alone keep replenishing it given the 5-7 year life expectancy of such satellites — while also pursuing other space ambitions will require China to increase its launch capacity by an order of magnitude. Building two requires a lot more rockets than that. The rocket shortage has clearly slowed down both projects. Qianfan in particular has struggled to find rocket companies to launch its satellites: none were launched for six months in 2025 as a result. That’s partly because of how the launch bidding process works: regulation requires three bidders; two public tenders issued in February 2025 to launch Qianfan satellites were canceled because only two entities bid, both subsidiaries of the SOE CASC. Eventually, coinciding with progress in the development of some commercial rocket companies, they got three bidders and in August 2025 awarded contracts to all three - LandSpace, Space Pioneer and CAS Space. Qianfan’s operator contracted the three to launch 94 satellites in seven groups between them, probably to diversify risk given how few times their rockets have been launched. Deployment has been beset by delays but has now finally started, with LandSpace's successful launch on 15th September, carrying ten Qianfan satellites. The other two have faced delays and issues with their rockets; Space Pioneer is all but certain not to be able to deploy Qianfan before 2027. What happens next? In its efforts to build its own equivalents to Starlink, the country’s launch capacity – growing, but still in the hundreds, not thousands – is the key constraint on building Chinese megaconstellations, with the tactical and strategic implications that would imply. Since the SOE’s Long March rockets are already in high demand from various state programs, China’s commercial rocket industry is stepping up. The commercial launch sector — driven since opening up in 2014 by subsidies and local state support, while demand remained unclear — now has dozens of rocket companies.1 Success is mixed: most have never launched. But a handful of leading companies with several successful launches under their belt, including LandSpace, are already supplying expendable rockets that have contributed to China’s recent increase in launch capacity. Over the long term, if LandSpace and other commercial companies prove that their reusable models are reliable, launches could shoot up, allowing China to build at least one megaconstellation on a scale comparable to Starlink. For now, that is a capability China cannot yet match.