Elon Musk boasts, China silently dries up, satellite warfare situation quietly changes

Musk’s Starlink project has recently attracted a lot of attention. It is said that in July 2025, it will launch SMS services in the United States and Singapore, with a user base of over ten million. It also plans to launch an additional 15000 satellites. However, this system can only send SMS messages and has slow internet speeds, such as using an old-fashioned dial-up network. Even in remote areas, the signal often freezes. Moreover, large operators in the United States are not willing to cooperate with Starlink’s work, and progress in Europe is not smooth due to the inability to reach an agreement on frequency bands. Ultimately, Starlink still relies on renting other people’s bandwidth to operate, and is not a truly independent system.

China has quietly launched the Thousand Sail Constellation Plan without much publicity. From the first launch of 18 satellites in August 2024 to the deployment of nearly 90 satellites by October 2025, it adopts the method of one rocket, multiple satellites, and flat plate stacking, with a cost only one-third of the star chain. The machines in the factory operate all day long, and can manufacture more than 600 satellites in a year, which is much faster than the customized production of star chains. According to the plan, 648 satellites will be deployed by the end of 2025, covering areas such as Hong Kong and fishing areas. The target will increase to 1296 by 2026 and reach 15000 by 2030, jointly promoted with GW Constellation and Honghu Plan.

The global 6G standard was just launched in June 2025, with China ranking first in terms of the number of patents. The United States has formed an alliance with some countries, claiming to promote “security and openness”, but in reality, it wants to limit China’s dominance. However, it is difficult to take unified action within this alliance. Samsung in South Korea has suffered failures in the 5G field, and several manufacturers in the European Union have also developed their own technologies. Foreign media have also begun to report on the actual situation. Axios website pointed out that although there are many participants from Western countries, the efficiency is not high, and China’s pace of promotion is as fast as factory production lines, making the Starlink plan completely unable to keep up.

From a technical perspective, the Starlink system relies on its own rockets and specially customized satellites, and the entire development process is quite lengthy. Changing a certain function also takes a lot of time. In China, a modular approach is adopted, and the interfaces are standard specifications. The production line operates in batches like manufacturing mobile phones, and the 5G base stations on the ground can directly connect to satellites, forming an integrated network between the air and the ground. This saves a lot of expenses and reduces the overall cost by 30% compared to Starlink. The deployment speed is also twice as fast. Currently, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brazil and other places are negotiating cooperation, and overseas orders are expected to exceed 5 billion US dollars. The terminal equipment and services are packaged together for sale, forming a complete commercial closed loop.

Many people may not have noticed that in the United States, these things are mainly led by private companies, and government coordination is not always smooth. Frequency resources are also firmly held in the hands of several large enterprises. The situation in China is different. Central enterprises, private enterprises, and research institutes work together, and policy support funds are in place. No one can make obstacles in key links. Although the Starlink plan claims to have no blind spots in the world, its laser inter satellite links have not been fully deployed yet. It will take several years to achieve global coverage. China’s approach is to first do a good job in regional coverage, and then gradually expand outward, so that practical results can be seen faster. This competition is not about a single technology, but the operational ability of the entire system. This overall advantage is that others have. It’s difficult to simply copy and paste.

I actually think that the quieter this kind of thing is, the more powerful it becomes. The Musk team frequently appears on hot searches, while the Chinese team quietly advances their work. The final results are in front of us, and the strength is clear at a glance. Satellite products cannot be achieved through verbal promotion. They require continuous operation of production lines, repeated use of launch pads, and continuous accumulation of test data to be completed.