In the first half of 2026, China completed 44 space launches, up nearly 26% year on year. Rockets are moving from “a few launches a year” toward high-frequency launch operations, making large-scale production an increasingly urgent priority.
And as the industry moves from building individual rockets to mass-producing them, China’s commercial space sector is now catching up on digitalization.
The Industry Is Starting to Mass-Produce Rockets
To understand why commercial rocket companies need digitalization, it is first necessary to understand the transformation the industry is undergoing.
For a long time, rocket manufacturing was essentially a “national project.” Whether it was the Apollo program, the Space Shuttle, or China’s Long March family of launch vehicles, mission success was the overriding priority, while cost considerations took a back seat.
It often took five, 10 or even more years for a rocket to go from project approval to its maiden flight. Development followed a lengthy cycle of “design-test-improve-retest,” with every stage repeatedly verified until the risk of failure was minimized.
Under this model, supply chains were largely closed. Core components were developed and manufactured by institutes and organizations within the state system, supporting systems were relatively fixed, and the number of suppliers was limited.
The organizational structure was also typically project-based: a large chief-designer team would be assembled around a single rocket, with tasks broken down layer by layer across different systems and subsystems.
This model made sense in its historical context. It enabled resources to be concentrated on cutting-edge technologies and helped ensure the success of major strategic missions. But its drawbacks were equally clear: long development cycles, high costs and low efficiency, making it difficult to respond to rapidly changing market demand.
As China’s commercial space industry has emerged, “low cost and high efficiency” have become new requirements imposed by the market, making the traditional model increasingly difficult to sustain. As the most fundamental transportation tool in commercial spaceflight, a rocket’s launch cost and delivery cycle directly determine whether the downstream satellite industry can truly scale.
The urgency on the demand side is already clear. As of early 2026, China had planned 133 satellite constellations, with more than 50,000 satellites scheduled for launch. The China SatNet and Qianfan satellite internet constellations are among the most pressing projects, with nearly 28,000 satellites planned between them.
For a networking effort of this scale, the window available to launch vehicles is relatively narrow.
Faced with such enormous launch demand, commercial rockets must move toward mass production. This is the underlying logic behind the industry’s current shift toward industrial-scale manufacturing.
Why Traditional Management Can’t Support Mass Production
When a company has only one rocket under development and production, it may be possible to manage the process with a project manager’s memory and a collection of Excel spreadsheets. But mass production raises the bar dramatically.
The first challenge is the exponential growth in the volume of materials and information.
Rocket manufacturing is a massive and complex systems-engineering operation involving hundreds of thousands of components and devices, as well as tens or even hundreds of kilometers of cabling. Take LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 as an example: its development involves more than 100,000 parts, with more than 600 suppliers across China participating in the process. LandSpace’s official website identifies the company as LANDSPACE and its Zhuque-3 rocket as ZQ-3.
In the past, bills of materials, inventory status, procurement progress and quality records could be scattered across different employees’ computers, with information exchanged through verbal communication and email.
Once rockets enter mass production, however, several vehicles of the same model may be undergoing final assembly simultaneously. Each rocket may have different component batches, test data and repair records. A single mistake can result in material mismatches, version confusion, missed inspections or incomplete testing—and when the product is a rocket, such errors can have catastrophic consequences at launch.
The second challenge is a completely new level of coordination.
Many rocket companies are now operating multiple sites in parallel, with R&D, manufacturing, supply chain and quality operations progressing simultaneously.
Take CAS Space as an example. The company has its headquarters and innovation research institute in Huangpu District, Guangzhou, focusing on advanced aerospace technologies and launch-vehicle development. It also operates a rocket manufacturing base in Nansha District, with an annual production capacity of 30 solid-fuel rockets, as well as a leading liquid-propulsion test center in Conghua District.
The coordination of R&D, manufacturing and testing across three locations places much higher demands on cross-regional collaboration, process integration and knowledge reuse.
More importantly, there is the problem of knowledge-transfer gaps.
Under the traditional model, a large amount of experience resides in the notebooks and memories of key engineers. A veteran engineer may remember exactly “under what conditions that valve caused a problem last time,” while a new employee has to start from scratch.
When a company’s production target increases from a few rockets a year to dozens, its workforce expands rapidly and the proportion of new employees rises sharply. Knowledge gaps then become immediately visible.
If technical specifications, problem cases and process parameters cannot be systematically recorded, searched and reused, the same mistakes may be repeated by different teams.
As both technical and management complexity increase, traditional methods are becoming increasingly inadequate.
More and more rocket companies are realizing that systematic management tools are essential to handle this level of organizational complexity. Digitalization is therefore shifting from an “option” to a “necessity.”
Digitalization Is Becoming a Common Choice for Commercial Rocket Companies
Once the question of “why digitalize?” has been answered, the next question is: how?
Today, LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 completed China’s first ground-based recovery of the first stage of an orbital-class rocket. The milestone was reported on August 18, 2026, when the company successfully landed the booster after launch.
The commercial rocket company behind this historic achievement had already deeply integrated Lark, the international name for Feishu, into its R&D and production operations as early as 2020. LandSpace’s official website confirms the company’s English branding as LANDSPACE.
LandSpace is not an isolated case. Over the past several years, leading commercial rocket companies including Orienspace and Galactic Energy have also introduced Lark into their core operations, covering areas such as R&D, production, supply chains and quality management.
The trend has recently gained another example: CAS Space and Lark have officially signed a cooperation agreement.
At this point, CAS Space’s Kinetica-1 has completed 15 flights and delivered a cumulative total of 110 satellites into orbit, making it the only commercial rocket in China to have launched more than 100 satellites, according to the company’s materials cited in the original article. With launch frequency continuing to rise and the number of rocket models increasing, the demands on collaborative management are growing accordingly.
The cooperation between CAS Space and Lark provides a more concrete look at how rocket companies can implement digitalization in practice.
First, connect systems and build a digital foundation.
CAS Space will gradually build and integrate its business systems on the Lark platform, using unified identities, a unified entry point and connected workflows to create a more seamless working environment.
Second, capture knowledge and turn experience into an organizational asset.
Using Lark as the medium, technical specifications, project experience, meeting discussions and business processes can be transformed into organizational knowledge that can be accumulated, searched and reused.
Third, introduce AI and bring intelligence into core business scenarios.
Within a secure and compliant framework, the company will explore additional AI applications and bring AI into knowledge Q&A, meeting collaboration, project management, as well as R&D, production, supply, sales and service operations.
This is becoming a typical path for digitalization among commercial rocket companies: automated data flows, system-driven processes, and organized, reusable knowledge.
Observation
Digital collaboration is becoming one of the foundational capabilities underpinning the industrialization of commercial rockets.
The adoption of Lark by leading commercial space companies shows how an integrated platform combining instant communication, document collaboration, multidimensional spreadsheets, AI capabilities and system integration can help rocket manufacturers turn the management of tens of thousands of components and materials into processes that are manageable, traceable and optimizable.
As commercial rockets enter an era of mass production, organizational management is becoming increasingly important.
And the answers to these organizational challenges are being written, step by step, by the companies at the forefront of the industry.
