China opens Asia’s largest satellite manufacturing base in Hainan

With a seamless process, satellites can be launched immediately after leaving the production line. More than 20 supply chain businesses have signed an agreement to locate here, contributing to building a comprehensive ecosystem including rocket development, satellite production, launch and tracking.

The facility at WIAC includes an international advanced satellite manufacturing center and an international satellite-rocket integrated research and development center. This is China’s only production facility that both assembles satellites and “packages” satellites into rockets for launch into space. Notably, the factory is located near the Wenchang space launch site, helping to reduce transportation costs and other risks.

The new project has an area of ​​60,000 m2 and the ability to manufacture 1,000 satellites per year, being introduced as the largest satellite manufacturing facility in Asia, helping to promote the deployment of large-scale satellite networks.

The super factory at WIAC will support the construction of Thousand Sails, a broadband network expected to have 15,000 satellites operating in low Earth orbit (LEO) by 2030. The first batch of Thousand Sails satellites launched into space last August. According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the network currently has 108 satellites in orbit. In addition to Thousand Sails, two other important networks with the number of satellites expected to exceed 10,000 in China are Guowang and Honghu.

Around the world, the satellite market is growing rapidly as many countries and businesses invest heavily in Internet satellite networks with the ability to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency connections and seamless coverage to remote areas. They help solve the problem of weak or no network infrastructure in mountains, oceans and deserts. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), by the end of 2024, nearly 2.6 billion people – equivalent to about 1/3 of the world’s population – will still not be connected to the Internet.

In the US, as of the end of October, SpaceX had nearly 9,000 Starlink satellites operating in orbit. In the UK, OneWeb has deployed 648 LEO satellites, making it the world’s second largest low-orbit satellite network, behind only Starlink. Meanwhile, Canada’s Telesat is developing the Lightspeed system of 198 satellites.