China’s Effort to Build a Competitor to Elon Musk's Starlink Is Off to a Bumpy Start

If you gaze up at the night sky, there's a good chance you’ll spot a trail of fast-moving, bright dots—newly launched Starlink satellites. But you might soon also see something else: spacecraft from Chinese projects building their own Starlink-like low Earth orbit satellite internet networks. More than 100 satellites have been launched from China since August—the first batches of two mega-constellations that are aiming to have about 28,000 satellites combined when they’re completed. The two Chinese projects are officially called Guowang and Qianfan, but they each have a confusing set of alternative names in English due to their corporate structures and language differences. The former, which is also known as Xingwang or SatNet, is primarily focused on domestic telecommunications and national security use cases. The latter, which is also known as Spacesail or SSST, is more oriented toward providing service to foreign telecom companies. So far, Qianfan has signed deals with Brazil, Mala ... Read full article.