Thousand Sails will be a “megaconstellation,” a new category of orbital satellite constellations that number in the thousands. SpaceX’s Starlink is the first and biggest such megaconstellation, with seven thousand satellites in orbit, a feat China aims to match. Thousand Sails is scheduled to have over one thousand satellites by 2027 and 14,000 in the 2030s. These are credible plans, both because there are no new technical challenges to overcome and because Chinese space organizations have had a good track record in recent decades of achieving their announced timelines.
China now has over 800 satellites in orbit, recently having overtaken the United Kingdom for second-most behind the United States. While the United States might seem far ahead at almost 9000, as recently as 2017 the U.S. had less than 800 satellites in orbit. Once new launch vehicles are developed, the number of Chinese satellites might quickly increase to match or exceed those launched by the United States. There is a revolution underway in space technology, with the United States leading and only China catching up. These are by no means the only Chinese space accomplishments in recent years.
The day after the first National Net deployment, Chinese astronauts Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong broke the record for the longest spacewalk in human history. The Chinese astronauts spent over nine hours working on maintenance and upgrades to the Chinese Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) space station, circling the Earth six times before their work was done. New, more lightweight and flexible Chinese spacesuits helped make this long spacewalk less tiring and dangerous. These achievements are not exceptional but expected for the modern Chinese space industry. Gone are the days of infrequent launches and deep caution.
In 2024, China launched 68 orbital rockets—a new record, and lagging behind only the United States. There were two failures in the growing commercial launch sector, but other commercial launches were successful. Recent Chinese successes in space have ranged from the Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions”) mission, driving a rover around the Martian surface for almost a year from 2021 to 2022, to commercial satellite launches for friendly nations, to a series of lunar exploration missions, starting with the Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter in 2007 and including the Chang’e-6 mission in 2024, which was the first mission by any nation to return samples from the dark side of the Moon. The United States undeniably finds itself in a new space race that its politicians and the American public barely know anything about. Unless that changes, it might well be a space race the Western superpower ends up losing.
The Chinese Plan to Outdo the Apollo Program
In the wake of the second successful Chinese lunar sample-return mission, Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping met with space program leaders in September 2024 and redoubled his emphasis on space achievements in the pursuit of national greatness, encouraging accelerated development. Xi has made his goals clear: to “explore the vast universe” and “become a great power in space.” The requirements for great power status, however, are relative. Cai and Song’s record-setting spacewalk was only barely longer than the old record after all—just enough for a news headline.
China’s space program, carried out by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), has become a focal point in building up national prestige and an aspirational mindset. Tellingly, contemporary CNSA program names such as the Chang’e series of lunar missions—named after the Chinese Moon goddess—draw from Chinese mythology rather than the history of revolutionary communism as with the Long March rockets—programs that began in an era when the Soviet Union, not just the United States, was far ahead in space technology.
Chinese lunar exploration has clearly become focused on sending a crewed mission to the Moon and landing astronauts on its surface, matching the United States’ accomplishment and prestige as currently the only country whose astronauts have walked on the Moon. The Chinese intend to go this decade too: current plans schedule a manned landing for 2030. After that, they intend to build a Moon base.
Various state-owned enterprises within the Chinese space industry are working on improving all the technologies they have developed over the last decade to help achieve this goal. These projects include more advanced spacesuits, a lunar lander, and, most importantly, a new super heavy-lift rocket. By U.S. conventions, a super heavy-lift rocket is one that delivers fifty metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). The Long March 10 rocket has a stated capacity clocking in at seventy metric tons to LEO and 27 to trans-lunar injection—the more energetically expensive trajectory required to reach the Moon. The first test flight is planned for 2026.
The third and final module of the Tiangong space station was installed in 2022. Launched on a Long March 5B rocket, the Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”) module weighed 23,000 kg at launch and had to be accelerated to over seven kilometers per second to achieve a stable orbit four hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Delivering to the existing modules with a crew on board required careful orbit alignment and a large robot arm to help manipulate the module into place. This was the realization of a plan conceived in the early 1990s. Chinese astronauts have inhabited the Tiangong station ever since, performing countless spacewalks, experiments, and live streams for the Chinese public.
The construction of the first permanent space station is not just an achievement in and of itself but a crucial stepping stone for manned missions deeper in space. Tiangong and the International Space Station (ISS) are the only space stations humans today operate in the Earth’s orbit. While the ISS is set to be decommissioned in the coming years, the Chinese space agency is preparing a new space telescope module to be launched in 2026 and periodically dock to their space station. The Chinese station has seen notable research take place, including experiments such as microgravity rice cultivation for feeding crews on long space voyages and tests of artificial photosynthesis to produce ingredients for rocket fuel. (...)
The Windfall of a Second Space Race
Chinese satellite internet may or may not be better than that of U.S. companies, but they are very likely to complete megaconstellations made up of thousands of satellites providing service across vast parts of the globe, if only for their own national security needs. CNSA may well beat NASA’s Artemis to the Moon, and they will almost certainly achieve manned lunar landing at lower cost. If SpaceX does send humans to Mars, barring unlikely changes in the nature and interests of the governing regime, China will quite likely have the capability to reach Mars not too much later.
China is expanding the vision of its space program. For example, future stages of the Tianwen interplanetary exploration missions include sample returns from the atmosphere of Venus in the 2030s. NASA has plans for this too, perhaps sooner but perhaps not. Venus is closer than Mars, has more Earth-like gravity, and the upper layers of its atmosphere may be able to support habitable colonies—floating cities in the sky above the lightning storms and acid rains. However, our understanding of the exact composition and properties of its atmosphere remains incomplete. If NASA is too mismanaged to keep to project timelines, China may well fill the gap.
by Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg, Palladium | Read more:
Image: Global Times/Long March-5B rocket launching in 2022
[ed. See also: The Moon Should be a Computer; and, A Trillion Tons in Orbit (Palladium):]
"Gerard O’Neill, a physicist at Princeton University who had previously applied for NASA’s Astronaut Corps, was dismayed at the growing apathy about space and the future that he was seeing in his students. To inspire them, he began a weekly freshman seminar in 1969 for a group of eight to ten students focused on large-scale engineering problems that could benefit a broad spectrum of humanity. The theme of his first seminar was “Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”
Over the course of the seminar, O’Neill and his students considered if, instead of colonizing Mars, we should build a megastructure that could serve as a space colony. Looking at the possible constraints of such a project from first principles, they began to realize they were solvable. This included an analysis of the economics, safety, simplicity, and ruggedness of every element of the megastructure’s conceptual design. (...)
The design concept the group settled on became known as “O’Neill cylinders.” These were to be vast space stations dwarfing the small scientific outposts of the 1970s such as Skylab or the contemporary International Space Station, and featured a pair of 20-mile long cylinders with three land areas alternating with three vast windows, plus three mirrors that open and shut to create a day-night cycle. The cylinders rotate in opposite directions, enabling them to remain aimed toward the sun and generating a centrifugal force that simulates the effect of gravity. (...)
Mars colonization is widely viewed as the logical end point for the first phase of space exploration. But we should again be asking if this is the right goal, and whether Gerard O’Neill’s vision represents a better path to colonizing space and a better driver of technological development."
