One stop shop purchase of satellite software and hardware! Commercial satellite full industry chain ‘supermarket’ launched
2025年10月16日Aerospace Hongtu officially signed a procurement contract for nearly 1 billion Internet satellites with a country in Africa
2025年10月16日The third bidding for the Qianfan Constellation networking plan, with the set launch targets and first flight time limit, has directly pushed domestic private rocket companies into a corner.
The hard target of a single launch capacity of 4.8 tons in low Earth orbit has already blocked all current commercial rockets from entering the market.
The Hyperbolic III of Star Glory has not yet made its maiden flight, the development of the Zhuque III of Blue Arrow has just begun, and even the Long March VI of the national team has only undergone two test launches.
This bidding is more like “rushing ducks to put on the shelves”, after all, the previous two bids couldn’t even attract three bidders. The requirement to complete the first flight by the end of 2025 forces companies to complete the research and development, testing, and orbit insertion of a new rocket in less than two years, which is one-third shorter than the development cycle of SpaceX Falcon 9.
The deployment scale of the Qianfan Constellation Phase III plan exceeds 15000 satellites, which is equivalent to launching an average of 4 satellites per day. At present, the annual launch capacity of domestic private rocket enterprises does not exceed 50 times, and this cliff like growth in demand directly exposes the fragility of the industrial chain. More noteworthy is the pricing issue. The unit price of 50000 yuan per kilogram, including tax, for package two is 30% lower than the 72000 yuan won by Blue Arrow Aerospace last year. This “both need and low cost” approach, which requires both high transportation capacity and low cost, can easily lead to the hidden danger of compressing safety costs for order grabbing.
Domestic commercial aerospace is now like being dragged by the demand of satellite Internet. The weight of a single Musk Starlink second-generation satellite has skyrocketed to 1.25 tons, and our constellation is still using a few hundred kilograms of small satellite stacks. The 2.8 ton payload requirement for a 950 kilometer orbit in this tender essentially involves using larger rockets to launch smaller satellites. It is worth considering whether this technological route is sustainable. As international competitors are already developing fully recyclable rockets, we are still addressing the issue of basic capacity, and this time window is really running out.