Private Space Launch Firms in China Race to Orbit | Hacker News Reader

Private Space Launch Firms in China Race to Orbit

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73 pointsstarmanaj28 comments

These firms are very questionably private. They're heavily funded by the Chinese government. Just because there's more than one does not make a company private.

You could say the same thing about spacex. Most of its contracts are from the US government.

Contracts for services delivered is not the same as monetary grants for basic startup development. SpaceX launched 4 rockets without an ounce of federal money.

I have no idea bout these individual companies.

But I do think the "funded by" say the Chinese government, and "has contract with" the US government isn't automatically the same thing.

It is baffling that most people do not know how the Chinese government interferes with private companies. It is nothing like what we see in the west. It interferes, subsidizes, promotes, regulates, funds and insures private companies to the extent that we can just call it Chinese government agency.

That is NOT the case with SpaceX + NASA.

What if China launches it's own satellite internet, subsidised by government, with goal to make it commercially unfeasible for others to launch their own? Yeah it'll be bit restricted at first but cheap and good enough for normal people that have "nothing to hide". They would get them done nice tracking options.

I'm not sure how that could happen. No matter how much money you have, this stuff takes time. There should be multiple independent companies providing satellite internet at low-cost with thousands of satellites each within 2-3 years (SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb, BlueOrigin's, etc).

I'm not sure how China could physically accomplish such a task - to prevent those companies from finding a market, despite being so far behind themselves?

>> at low-cost with thousands of satellites each within 2-3 years.

Not for a few decades. The first customers will be/are airlines and ships, both of which are willing to pay top dollar. Then will be the governments (air forces etc) and logistics companies (fedex). Only once all those high-price/profit customers are happy will anyone talk about prices comparative with current consumer satellite options (explorenet etc).

The days of flat panels on rooftops talking to multiple low-orbit sats will come, just not for another generation or so. Cubesats won't fit the bill. These will be expensive networks of expensive sats.

It will not take SpaceX 'decades' to enable widespread commercial and personal use of the network. It is SpaceX's intent to use it as a revenue driver for the early work on the Martian colony, which is planned to get started in 5-6 years. Therefore Starlink must be operational long before then or the whole plan fails.

Also, I think Starlink's launches are planned to ramp up significantly in the next 1-2 years, immediately enabling multiple use cases popular in multiple very large consumer industries (gaming, streaming, etc).

Don't believe the hype. Any KSP nerd can work out how many sats would be needed for coverage at a given altitude (thousands to keep two above horizon in leo). Then any networking nerd can work out the number of hops and downlink stations needed (hundreds). Those thousands of sats will also need to be replaced as quickly as 10-15% per year, unless they are going to get their own propulsion systems, seriously multiplying their cost of launch/operation.

Take a look at the difficulties in setting up downlink stations at a global scale. To facilitate the dreamed bandwidth the number of hops between satellites will have to be as low as possible. Hundreds of large base stations will be needed. New land must be purchased, new laws passed, and old laws abolished. Unless spaceX intends to have Musk elected to the presidencies of many nations, the regulatory hurdles alone will take decades.

I don't understand this logic. SpaceX's bread-and-butter is building technology and setting up processes to lower launch costs to hilariously low levels.

> Those thousands of sats will also need to be replaced as quickly as 10-15% per year, unless they are going to get their own propulsion systems, seriously multiplying their cost of launch/operation.

Multiplying by.....10%? I think they would laugh off those costs and easily pay for that with the huge margin they are likely to be eyeing.

> Take a look at the difficulties in setting up downlink stations at a global scale. To facilitate the dreamed bandwidth the number of hops between satellites will have to be as low as possible. Hundreds of large base stations will be needed. New land must be purchased, new laws passed, and old laws abolished.

Can you cite this? What new laws must be passed and what old laws abolished? Also,

> Unless spaceX intends to have Musk elected to the presidencies of many nations, the regulatory hurdles alone will take decades.

This is hyperbole and clearly not true. Countries make deals with businesses all the time, especially when the business is likely to bring opportunity and money into the country. I have a hard time imagining a world where leaders and countries are anti-SpaceX to the point of stalling negotiations until Elon is 75 years old and already lives on Mars.

Lastly, citing unknown video game nerds and believing their interpretations over the CEO of a public company (yes I'll count Tesla here, it speak to his dedication of running global-scale changing companies) and the specifications of a private company with ~10,000 employees? It just seems less likely to be true that video game nerds know best here.

Downlinking issues in Canada, not exactly a hostile marketplace:

>>> The government decision: Primary telemetry, telecommand and control facilities and network operations centres must be located within Canadian territory. A description and planned location of these facilities must be included in licence applications. The final location of these facilities must be confirmed by Milestone 1, with construction completed by the launch of the first satellites (Milestone 3), as defined in CPC 2-6-02, Licensing of Space Stations.

https://spaceq.ca/the-government-issues-revised-satellite-li...

Read up on space law. Read about who controls data from spacecraft, who has veto power over it, and who controls the radio spectrum needed to talk to satellites.

>>> Lastly, citing unknown video game nerds and believing their interpretations over the CEO of a public company

If you play KSP you know of what I speak. A CEO cannot overcome physics. Anyone who plays KSP knows what it would mean to create a network to pass a relay over a given spot in leo every hour/day/minute etc. This is basic orbital dynamics, something KSP teaches very well. So yes, if a CEO is ignoring the basic realities of motion, then I would cite to a video game (aka a physics simulator).

They will just make the roofs of Tesla's the downlink stations... problem solved!

They'll more likely be ISPs - SpaceX is pushing Starlink as backhaul to be attached to more conventional last-mile connections.

I'm hopeful but I've seen what seem like legitimate questions as far as how much bandwidth Starlink could actually provide a given customer once they ramp up customers. As far as I know there is no real guarantee or anything from Starlink (understandable) but I'm a bit concerned about that.

Yeah, just a difference of who the high-price customers are going to be.

The (state-owned) main contractor for the Chinese space program, CASC, launched the first satellite of its planned +300-satellite 'Hongyan' broadband communications constellation late last year. The aim? Providing global internet access. How far it goes is hard to say, but none of the western/other broadband satellites would be able to provide services to China, so there's that market at least.

> How far it goes is hard to say, but none of the western/other broadband satellites would be able to provide services to China, so there's that market at least.

How would the Chinese government block someone from pointing a satellite dish at the sky?

One method is that your neighbors may report you. In China, part of the social credit system is that your neighbors will report you for doing anything against the law or the rules. So they may not 'block' you from putting it up and getting internet through it, but try going to work the next day you may be blocked from getting on the train.

Edit: Everything I said here was strictly factual. I'm not sure why it's so quickly downvoted so here is a source to back it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw. And one more, regarding the trains in particular: http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/china-social-credit-travel-ban...

Basically any attempt to make statements about "the" social credit system in China is going to be at least slightly wrong, since there is no single system. There are several pilots of different possible implementations, but no complete system yet (both of your sources actually mention this). Some are run by private financial companies to determine eligibility for their loans, some are run by city governments to provide credit rating for companies (e.g. https://wzcredit.gov.cn/ ) and apparently some rely on neighbors reporting each other. (This is the first time I heard about that one, though.)

The blacklist that prevents people from buying high-speed train tickets is http://zxgk.court.gov.cn/shixin/ and it usually works as a court-ordered punishment between fines and a prison sentence. The intention seems to be to target people who owe money and falsely claim not to have it by preventing their ability to spend it on "luxury." I.e. if you have the money to take a faster train, they'd prefer it if you used that to pay your debts.

Yikes, how horrifying

Presumably all the services will need dedicated slices of spectrum -- they're all licensing bands from the FCC in the US for that purpose, for example. So: nothing, I don't think, but they might not work if in China they're unlicensed and those chunks of spectrum are also used for TV or whatever.

Plus if they operate the service in China, the companies could be fined, or the users of the satellite dish could be fined/imprisoned, etc., etc.

The parent mentions this is going to be provided by a Chinese company - while they can't control your satellite on the ground, they can control theirs in orbit.

The US has been geolocating dishes [1] in order to see what they are pointing at, even in residential areas. You have to imagine, if deemed worthy, positioning a just-in-time line-of-sight intercept with a SIGINT satellite is passing in view is very easy to do. Pre-computing these targets is a well solved problem at this point, even down to moon bounce and esoteric methods from the 60s-70s.

[1]: https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-hunt-for-ghosthu...

> How would the Chinese government block someone from pointing a satellite dish at the sky?

Literally, men with guns show up and take the thing off your roof. It can be done at a very low tech and brute force local policing level. As an example: Occasionally the Iranian government goes on a program of confiscating Ku/Ka band Rx only (TVRO) satellit dishes off peoples' roofs.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/iran-destroys-100000-...

google "iran satellite dish police" for further examples.

Also, it only takes about one hour to train an unskilled person in how to use a portable spectrum analyzer and dipole/yagi antenna to locate the source of a transmission. Two way satellite things on roofs need to transmit back.

lol, good luck to them tracking and censoring. We'd have an underground encrypted mutating network protocol in hours running, not much the Chinese government could do to stop it short of cutting access from outside China again.

Thanks China!

For the life of me I can't parse that title.

China has contracted with Private Space to pick up entire enterprises and send them into orbit, thus making the development of a space station in orbit irrelevant :-) (ok it's Friday alright?)

It is a pretty convoluted title. Perhaps they could have said, "China's Commercial Space companies are now at the 'blowing up rockets' stage." Which is the penultimate stage to the one where the rocket gets all the way into orbit.

It is kind of a weird concept in purely Communist country insomuch as the idea of commercial space in an open market country is to to capture market capital and prioritize it to space launch capability. What is harder is that you can't really sell orbital rockets to third parties (the pesky NPT gets in the way, and it is generally frowned upon). I would have expected them to go with something similar to the the setup Russia has with USRC[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Rocket_and_Space_Corpor...

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