Parts of China’s space strategy might not seem directly tied to defense: plans for a joint Chinese-Russian lunar facility, a permanently-crewed space station or a burgeoning quasi-commercial launch sector. It’s the latter that China uses to bridge innovation gaps in low-cost rocketry and satellite constellation deployment.
Last year, I met Yao Song. His company, Orienspace, was not yet four years old. And it had already built some of the most powerful rockets developed by the Chinese commercial sector. Our first conversation took place after his company’s Gravity-1 medium-lift launch vehicle blasted off the deck of a ship stationed in the Yellow Sea last January, delivering a rocket that could haul 14,300 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit.
There was a market for “emergency” missions, he told me, in a nod to Orienspace’s growing potential to satisfy needs of rapid deployments of payloads, satellites, or even weapons for a Chinese military. In the United States, Firefly Aerospace had been selected to fulfill a similar function for the U.S. Space Force. But for Song, it was SpaceX that commanded the most attention.
“Every Starship launch, every Starlink launch, and frankly every word Elon says is covered with interest,” explained Blaine Curcio, Founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting and an authority on the Chinese space sector. “If you line up all the big milestones that SpaceX has had, and what China is doing, there’s a bit of a lag, but there’s a clear mimicking.”
Song was no different. The plan, he told me, was to fly nearly 100 reusable rockets annually, with the goal of undercutting SpaceX launch prices.
“Our target is to go lower than Falcon 9,” he said during a call from Beijing. For a SpaceX Falcon 9, the cost at the time was $2,720 per kilogram, compared to a Galaxy-1 price tag of then $4,000 per kilogram.
But to effectively compete, China had to “master reusable rocket technologies,” explained Qu Wei of the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics in Beijing. As such, a burgeoning reusable space race had unfolded.
Often known as “SpaceX and the seven dwarves,” Orienspace stood among at least six other Chinese companies endeavoring to break into the reusable launch market, which included those like the Chinese company Space Pioneer. Last summer, the company added $207 million in a blend of private equity and state-tied investment for its reusable Tianlong-3 rocket, a medium-lift launch vehicle. Not to be out done, China’s main state-owned aerospace company – China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) – also unveiled plans to launch its own reusable rockets for the first time in 2025.
Song, meanwhile, was still working on getting his company’s 60-meter-tall Gravity-2 off the ground, in which the first stage was intended to be reusable.
That rocket could launch up to 30 satellites, important for Beijing as it sought to rival SpaceX’s Starlink constellation with its own 13,000-satellite project. Unlike SpaceX, however, which draws billions in federal contracts, the Chinese government also tends to support supply side developments, “which comes in the form of building factories,” Curcio explained.
For Orienspace, which is headquartered in China’s third-largest provincial economy of Shandong, where authorities are building a space-centric assembly, integration and test center, the company has “gotten pretty well ingratiated in that plan,” he noted.
“They have a lot of money,” Curcio added.
Chinese commercial entities then often benefit from immense (and patient) sources of capital, backstopped by centralized authorities. Although they are also saddled with a level of government stake and oversight not typically seen in U.S. markets, especially when it comes to space.
‘The space sector is a little bit different,” explained Glenn D. Tiffert, distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-chair of its program on the US, China, and the World. “Because it has such intimate national security implications.”
Perhaps nowhere was that more apparent than during Galaxy-1’s maiden launch last year.
“I was at the stage,” Song told me. “There’s a stage to watch the launch with thousands of people. The control center in China actually requires high level confidential qualification. And I was not enough to get into that control center.”
“So this is your own rocket and you couldn’t get in?,” I asked.
“Yeah,” he responded. “A lot of the operation actually is conducted by the military, not by us.”
This article first appeared in the March 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
