China presses the accelerator onautarky applied, this time, to satellites and aims to launch almost 13,000 to “suppress” it Elon Musk’s Starlinks. It is happening just as Elon Musk himself is trying in every possible way to re-establish dialogue with the Chinese authorities, among other things he has asked for a meeting with the new prime minister Li Qiang, former head of the party in Shanghai, the municipality in which Tesla’s Chinese adventure developed. The constellation of satellites is likely to be launched quickly to prevent SpaceX from monopolizing “low-orbit resources,” according to space scientists from the Beijing Armed Forces.
Project “GW”
The project, codenamed “GW,” would deliver services Internet and could be used to spy on rival networks and carry out anti-Starlink missions which, according to what the scientists add, aims to put into orbit 40 thousand satellitestoo many for China’s surveillance and defense capabilities.
Beijing is working to build a huge satellite network in near-Earth orbit to provide Internet services to users around the world and to mute Starlink. “GW” would be led by a team from the Chinese State Space Engineering University.
The GW constellation will include 12,992 satellites owned by China Satellite Network Group Co, the news was reported by a specialized Chinese scientific magazine published in mid-February and picked up by some Chinese media on Saturday 8 April.
Starlink
Starlink operates with relatively small and cheap satellites launched by the carrier SpaceX Falcon 9, again from Musk, by the dozen at a time. Nominally they allow you to have fast Internet access anywhere on the globe, including the Ocean, but this only when the constellation is complete, at the moment, more than 4 thousand satellites in orbithowever, cover various points of the globe.