From being managed by the state to competing among hundreds of rivals, China’s commercial aerospace industry is ushering in its own moment of glory, driven by both policy support and technological breakthroughs.<\/p>\n
Today let\u2019s talk about: the current development status of China\u2019s commercial aerospace industry chain.<\/p>\n
01<\/p>\n
Early aerospace industry chain<\/p>\n
For a long time in the past, China’s aerospace industry was a highly confidential and state-led industry. From the supply of raw materials, production of components, manufacturing of complete machines, to final application services, the entire industrial chain is almost entirely composed of units within the system. Among them, the four major systems of Aerospace Science and Technology, Aerospace Science and Industry, CETC and Chinese Academy of Sciences play a core role. In other words, aerospace projects are almost all “in-house” from design and manufacturing, to measurement and operation control, testing and testing, to ground station construction and data application. In a specific historical period, this system played an irreplaceable role in concentrating efforts to conquer key technologies and ensure the smooth implementation of major national space missions. The success of “two bombs and one satellite” is the most favorable proof. However, as global aerospace develops faster and faster, especially SpaceX, which has triggered disruptive changes in commercial aerospace technology and markets, the power of traditional aerospace alone can no longer sustain the future. <\/p>\n
02<\/p>\n
What is the current situation?<\/p>\n
2015 is a watershed year for China\u2019s aerospace industry. This year, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments jointly issued the “National Mid- and Long-term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025)”, which for the first time explicitly encouraged private capital to enter the field of satellite development and launch. Subsequently, a number of private commercial aerospace companies such as Blue Arrow Aerospace were established one after another, and a large number of entrepreneurs also poured into this emerging track. The “Jilin-1” network developed by Changguang Satellite was successfully launched, opening a new chapter in my country’s commercial satellite applications. After ten years of development, China’s commercial aerospace industry has gradually formed an industrial structure dominated by the national team and diversified participation of private enterprises. Specifically, private commercial aerospace enterprises can be roughly divided into three categories: intra-system entrepreneurship: such as Xingchen Space, which was born in the 502 Institute of the Fifth Academy, and Changguang Satellite incubated by the Changchun Optics Machinery Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which entered the market relying on profound technical foundation; Commercial aerospace “second entrepreneurial” team: such as Xingyi Lianxin and Tianfu Gaofen, the founders are all from Jiutian MSI, the first private satellite company in China; Introduction from outside the industry: When early private aerospace companies broke through the limitations of the traditional supply chain, they took the initiative to introduce a number of high-precision private forces from outside the aerospace industry, such as metal 3D printing companies Blit, Farsoon High-Tech, and alloy materials company Sri New Materials. But having said that, although private enterprises are becoming more and more prominent in terms of quantity growth, technological innovation, cost control and application expansion, the core links and overall voice of the aerospace industry chain are still firmly in the hands of the traditional “national team”. Private commercial aerospace companies must make greater efforts to truly gain a foothold in the industry and expand their influence. <\/p>\n
03<\/p>\n
Three major challenges faced<\/p>\n
China’s commercial aerospace industry chain has completed a leapfrog breakthrough “from 0 to 1”, but there are still three problems if it wants to achieve large-scale and market-driven development “from 1 to N”: 1. The cost is too high. Traditional aerospace takes “guaranteing success” as its top priority, with long single product and trial production cycles, many redundant designs, and high labor and test costs. This non-profit model is different from the underlying logic of commercial aerospace. Once it enters market competition, it has to compete on price\u2014launch costs, satellite unit prices, and entire satellite life cycle costs must all be significantly reduced. Taking SpaceX as an example, its single launch cost has dropped to the range of 1,500-3,000 US dollars per kilogram. With the Starlink plan, it has deployed more than 6,000 satellites and is the first to commercialize direct mobile phone connection services. The Falcon 9 launch vehicle has also achieved multiple recovery and reuse of the first-stage rocket body. Its first-stage booster B1067 has completed 29 reuse flights so far, effectively reducing launch costs and significantly increasing launch frequency. In contrast, my country’s commercial rockets are still mainly used for one-time use, and the cost of a single launch is still hovering in the range of 5,000-8,000 US dollars\/kg. Reuse technology has not been popularized, and the potential of launch frequency and cost optimization is far from being released. 2. There is no large-scale and standardized production capacity. In 2024, my country will launch 257 satellites throughout the year, including 201 commercial satellites, accounting for 78.2%. Mega-constellations such as StarNet and Qianfan need to launch more than a thousand satellites every year to proceed as planned. Whether it is the production of rockets or satellites, the traditional “hand-rubbing” method is still used, and the standards are not unified. “Customized” production is the mainstay, and all links have not truly achieved batch and large-scale production. 3. There are too few “outside the industry” supply chain companies. China’s aerospace industry has long been dominated by the system, and key components and processes are almost in the hands of a few units. If companies outside the industry want to enter, they not only need to invest a lot of money and manpower, but also need to go through a long time to reach aerospace-level quality and certification standards. Moreover, commercial aerospace is still in the early stages of development, and the scale of total orders is limited, resulting in a lack of motivation for private companies outside the industry to enter the industry. Upstream companies in fields such as aerospace forgings, precision machining, and special materials are unwilling to bear the costs of technology research and development and production line transformation because it is difficult to see stable returns in the short term. As a result, there are few upstream suppliers, high prices, and slow delivery, which directly affects the pace of rapid development and cost reduction of commercial aerospace. <\/p>\n
04<\/p>\n
How to solve the dilemma?<\/p>\n
Facing the three major challenges of cost, production capacity and supply chain, the development of China’s commercial aerospace industry cannot be solved alone. The core of the solution lies in three elements: capital, talent and cooperation. Only by breaking the “monopoly” and allowing more new market entities and innovative forces to pour in can the industry enter the fast lane. However, as more new players enter, the industry will inevitably face two major practical obstacles: 1. Information asymmetry: New players often do not know who the real market demand side is, and it is difficult for the demand side to quickly and accurately find suppliers with capabilities and qualifications. The lack of a transparent and standardized information docking mechanism buries potential cooperation opportunities, lengthens the project promotion cycle, and even causes duplication of investment and waste of resources. 2. High trust threshold: The aerospace field has extremely strict requirements for quality and reliability, and any mistake may cause huge losses. In the past, the industry circle was relatively small, and most of the partners knew the basics, so trust naturally existed. But now that the number of participants has surged, it takes additional time and cost for unfamiliar companies to verify their technical capabilities and performance levels. In response to these problems, Nihao Space will focus on two key tasks in the second half of the year: Comprehensive combing of the commercial aerospace industry chain: Systematically combing the upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry chain to clarify what products and services they can provide, as well as core technologies and product service characteristics, so that “who does what and is good at what” is clear at a glance. Publish the “Star Supply Chain List”: Screen and evaluate 3-5 high-quality companies in each segment to form an industry-recognized cooperation list, provide reliable reference for demanders, and reduce the cooperation threshold and initial trust cost. We look forward to using these two tasks to help the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain quickly exchange information and build trust, and jointly promote China’s commercial aerospace industry to a new level of high-quality development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From being managed by the state to competing among hundreds of rivals, China’s commercial aerospace industry is ushering in its own moment of glory, driven by both policy support and technological breakthroughs. Today let\u2019s talk about: the current development status of China\u2019s commercial aerospace industry chain. 01 Early aerospace industry chain For a long time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25217"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}