At present, our country mainly has two giant satellite Internet constellations, namely the “GW” constellation led by China Star Network Group and the Qianfan Constellation led by Shanghai Yuanxin, also known as the “G60” constellation. The “GW” constellation currently launches only test satellites, and no network satellites have been launched yet. Qianfan Star Network has currently conducted three network satellite launches. At 14:42 on August 6, 2024, the Qianfan Constellation Polar Orbit 01 satellite was successfully launched. At 19:06 on October 15, 2024, the Qianfan Constellation Polar Orbit 02 satellite was successfully launched. At 12:41 on December 5, 2024, the Qianfan Constellation 03 satellites were successfully launched. The three launches were all launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the “18-satellite-one-shot” manner, and the satellites successfully entered the predetermined orbit. At this point, the number of Qianfan constellation satellites in orbit has increased to 54. As the efficiency of networking continues to improve, the importance of the supply chain will become increasingly important. Next, let\u2019s briefly talk about Qianfan Constellation\u2019s core supply chain enterprise-Aotian Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd.<\/p>\n
The overall unit of the Qianfan Constellation Group 02 satellites is Shanghai Gesi Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd., and Gesi\u2019s electric thrusters are supplied by Aotian.<\/p>\n
Aotian was established in June 2018. It is mainly engaged in the development of space propulsion systems and has a commercial electric propulsion intelligent production line. At present, the main products include Hall electric thrusters, coaxial pulse plasma electric propulsion products, micro vacuum arc electric thrusters, HAN working fluid propulsion products, liquid ammonia air-conditioning propulsion products, resistance propulsion products, etc.<\/p>\n
Aotian is one of the earliest companies to do electric actuators. There were relatively few companies doing electric actuators at the beginning, but now there are quite a few. In addition to Aotian, Beijing Yidong Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing Xingchen Technology Co., Ltd., and Shanghai Blue Arrow Hongqing Technology Co., Ltd. are also doing it. Yidong was established in 2020, and Xingchen was established in 2019. Xingchen assigned an electric pusher to another constellation. I just called it a few days ago. I will talk about Xingchen another day.<\/p>\n
Electric thrusters are mainly used for satellite orbit changes, orbit maintenance, attitude adjustment, etc. The current pain points in this market are mainly immature technology and high thruster costs. The maturity and reliability of our country’s current low-power ion thrusters still lag behind some foreign countries. In terms of cost reduction, everyone used xenon in the past, but xenon is expensive. Each kilogram of xenon costs about 100,000 yuan. A satellite requires about 20 kilograms, so the propeller fuel cost of a satellite is 2 million yuan. Xenon is very suitable for electric propulsion because it is easily ionized and has high propulsion efficiency. However, there are only about 0.09 ml of xenon in 1 cubic meter of air, and it is very difficult to purify xenon, which makes it very expensive. Now everyone is slowly replacing xenon with krypton gas. The cost of one kilogram of krypton gas is about 14,000, so the cost of a single satellite’s thruster can be reduced to 280,000. Krypton gas is cheap because its content in the air is high. There are about 1.5 liters of krypton gas in 1 cubic meter of air, so the cost is naturally reduced. But Musk has now begun to use argon as the electric propulsion medium. Argon is cheaper because it has a higher content in the air and is easier to obtain. However, the ionization efficiency of argon is low, so the propulsion efficiency of argon is not high. In the future, it will actually be more about a balance, how to balance cost and performance, and who will compromise with whom.<\/p>\n
According to Aotian’s own statement, 100 units of its products have been successfully put into orbit, and a total of about 200 units have been delivered this year. It is the commercial aerospace company with the largest number of electric propulsion products in orbit in China. I don’t know if other companies agree with this statement. On the 5th of this month, Aerospace held a launch ceremony at its smart manufacturing base in Chengdu. After the project is completed, it will have the ability to provide supporting equipment for more than 1,000 commercial satellites every year. In order to introduce Aotian, Chengdu also invested a lot of money in him. It can be regarded as a model of Chengdu leading by investment.<\/p>\n
According to the trend of the commercial aerospace industry, large-scale cost reduction will definitely be the main theme of the future. With the trend of continuous cost reduction of electric propulsion products, how will the pattern of the electric propulsion market change? The meat on the big plate is constantly being compressed. It will be interesting to see how Aotian will get the meat into its own bowl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At present, our country mainly has two giant satellite Internet constellations, namely the “GW” constellation led by China Star Network Group and the Qianfan Constellation led by Shanghai Yuanxin, also known as the “G60” constellation. The “GW” constellation currently launches only test satellites, and no network satellites have been launched yet. Qianfan Star Network has […]<\/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-25497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25497"}],"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=25497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}