Translating the trends and deciphering the headlines.
This is Roundtable.
I'm Niu Honglin.
A rocket retrieved from the sea, a plan to deploy more than 200000 satellites across 14 satellite constellations.
These are not isolated headlines, but signals of a deeper constructural change.
Today, we invite you to take a closer look at China's commercial space industry and find out how it relates to each and every one of us.
For today's show, I'm joined by Fei-Fei and Steve Hatherly.
Now pull up a chair and join the conversation.
For decades, space in China was synonymous with national missions and strategic milestones.
Today, a new set of vocabulary is emerging.
Reusability, cost control, commercial payloads, and market valuation.
The boundary between national team and private players is being a bit blurred.
From private rockets that lend themselves to space buses, launching rose seeds for a quick tan in cosmic radiation, China's commercial space scene is absolutely exploding.
We are talking a million or a multi-trillion yuan industry that's shifting from launching giant satellites for big corporations to selling tickets to maybe even you and me.
So here is the million dollar question for today.
Are we witnessing a big moment for commercial space industry in China?
I think it's really a huge topic.
It's something that's really far away in the sense that I cannot really imagine myself being a space traveler.
Yet it's also quite close because when we shop in the supermarket, very highly likely that something you buy is already an offspring of a certain seed that has gone to space and came back.
When it comes to commercial space or commercial space industry.
One significant event happened only earlier this month.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, where do we begin?
Like even in the earlier of this month, which is only the first month of 2026, a number of launches has already been witnessed across China.
And I think one of them is on January, the 12th, where a company, a private firm, called Caspace, launched a Li Hong-1, also known as PH-1, and they successfully completed its first suborbital flight test.
So it launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, and then the spacecraft blasted past the a line called the Karma Line, basically the borderline between us on the Earth and also on the space.
So reaching an altitude of about 120 kilometers.
And then that is only one of the launches.
There are also some other ones happening as well.
Just too many to just pinpoint each one of them, I think, on the show today.
This one was a pretty cool one.
It was up there for about 300 seconds in a microgravity environment.
And the payload, it re-entered the atmosphere.
It used a parachute system.
Very accurate, actually.
It touched down within just 100 meters of its target.
But what it brought back was the cool part that I mentioned.
The passengers, if you will.
Rose seeds...
Yes, rows like that rose, like the flower rose and a high tech 3D metal printer.
Those were the passengers for that particular flight.
I think we're going to get to both of those just a little bit later on.
But yeah well, actually let me talk about the rose seeds just a little bit first, because what they did was they took the seeds up there.
And then they expose them to radiation.
And what that radiation does is it triggers mutations within the seeds.
And then the scientists.
They're now going to take those seeds back to their labs to grow what they call aerospace roses.
Yes, I'll repeat that again.
Aerospace roses.
New varieties that they're hoping that they'll be tougher.
They're hoping that they'll be prettier, although that's a relative term.
And then what they want to do is they want to build this whole aerospace rose germplasm bank.
So that was one of the missions for this particular flight.
We think this is significant not only because the passengers are really cool, but also because, if we really think about having commercial space as an industry, you need to make sure that the cost effectiveness is in the range that a company can really consider.
And a way to bring the cost down would be make sure that the rockets to start with are reusable.
So we've conquered that already for several times.
We see, for example, this specific one, this specific Li Hongwan.
It is a returnable payload capsule.
It will be upgraded into a orbital class space manufacturing spacecraft with a maximum on-orbit duration of no less than one year and a reusability of at least 10 missions.
So that has already lowered the cost.
Now, what this experiment or this mission improves or showcases is that now not only Can we use only one rocket to send multiple satellites into the space.
We can also retrieve them.
So when you can send them out there, you can do experiment there and send data back.
But when you can retrieve them, you can get the seeds back and grow beautiful flowers.
And this is the difference, isn't it, between a government space project in the commercial space industry.
I think for many people, when they hear commercial space industry, they think about oh, i'm gonna become an astronaut myself and i'm gonna travel, i'm gonna pay a ton of money and i'm gonna go up there and i'm gonna see earth from a different point of view.
And yes, that is part of it, but it's not the only thing.
Yeah, so the biggest difference between a government project and a commercial one is kind of the end goal.
Traditional space projects.
Take, for example, the Shenzhou 20 mission.
Those are state-led initiatives that are focused on a national strategy, or security, if you will.
And the commercial space industry, though, is driven by what they call commercial logic.
And that means that companies are trying to make money.
They're trying to compete with each other in the market and they're trying to find ways to make space travel sustainable and affordable for the rest of us.
Yes, but also take things like rose seeds into space and do their own types of experiments so that they can figure out how to make best use of those things, so they can benefit from them on Earth.
Yes, and this one is kind of like opening a new line of work for this company.
Not only can they send things up, they can also retrieve things back.
And if they want, they can also...
Let's say welcome the kind of client who need a ride into the space and become their space laboratory for hire.
Exactly.
I think a lot of the site sites that we are seeing these days they especially launched in the southern island province of Hainan is working in this model.
That, for example, a commercial form, space form.
They developed their own carrier, rocket.
And different other companies who have the need of sending a satellite into the space or needing the data from those satellites can working with these companies and either launch their own satellites or share data collected by these satellites.
And I think for this year in particular, one of the key areas for the private space sector is basically to master on the reusability of rocket technology.
It is also said by an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that the mastering such technology to reuse the rockets, not only doing so by breaking a lot of the technical difficulties, but also reducing the costs and paving the way for a lot of space projects and such as more efficient buildup of space-based satellite communication networks.
We're not talking about just one satellite.
We're talking about Different ones, dozens of ones, forming a whole network, for example for work, for our phone connections.
And also, for example, helping our farming or emergency rescue GPS.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And those kind of technologies as well.
Um, china has been thinking about, and also starting with, the commercial space industry.
I think, at least in 2014.
Around that time, we see private rocket and commercial satellite teams were founded one after another, and we see that um, that was the time that china's first private rocket orbital launch was happening, and then multiple satellites happened in 2019 and after 2020.
Satellite internet was included in the new infrastructure agenda.
So the infrastructure, of course, the old ones uh, include high-speed railway, but the new one is talking about the satellite internet that Fei-Fei has also mentioned.
And then in 2025, China conducted over well around 87 different space launches in a year, with commercial and private rockets carrying out for 23 different times and sending out 324 satellites.
It is seen as the time when commercial space industry is really taking off.
Yeah, and the time to develop those satellites is so much less now than it used to be, maybe up to a year before, and now they can get it done in about a month, I think, which is kind of mind-blowing.
I mean, the industry itself is really growing almost at an unbelievable rate.
There are reports that are talking about this And they say that it's projected to reach about 7 to 10 trillion, or 7 to 10 trillion yuan, excuse me.
That's about $1 trillion by about 2030.
And there are many companies involved.
One is Landspace.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one.
That's a Chinese space technology company.
And it's pretty exciting.
I mean they're leading the charge for what they want to be the first commercial rocket stock on the stock market.
So when the rumors of their IPO hit in the new year, the stock price of one of their investors surged 72 in just one week.
And that shows how much cash is starting to flow into this sector.
And a lot of people are paying attention.
If you are someone who's interested in the stock market, you should pay attention to China's space, commercial space related stock market because so many, with so many things happening in the industry, we can see the vitality in the stock market especially.
I think we were talking about it before the show.
Sometimes different missions would have different significance and especially in the area of commercial space we don't only see like 100 success as a success.
If because recently we've also witnessed several not very 100 successful try of retrieving satellite or retrieving satellite to the exact location that was not that frustrating as what we would assume.
We would assume oh, if we didn't successfully get it back it's a bad thing.
But for business insiders they see the experiment, they gather from that mission, they see what they learn and maybe they don't see it as a failure.
They see it as one step further to success and that would also spur the stock market.
So it's a very interesting correlation between the different missions and then the change in the stock market.
And, that being said, other trends and other possibilities and other try in the market would also make people feel very excited.
For example, now we are looking at the trend of having the entire industry mostly concentrating on B2B business to business, moving a little bit to business to consumer as well.
Yeah, and this is the point that I think escapes us as the general public a lot of the time, at least it escapes me.
You know, if you think of a company the way that it used to be, a company would build a satellite, perhaps for the military, or something like that.
Naturally.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
That's the way it used to be.
And then that GPS signal coming from that satellite would allow us to use...
Things like maps on our phone or even ordering a taxi something like that like ride hailing or tracking a delivery on your phone.
But then companies build communication satellites for TV broadcasters, and that makes a difference to us as well.
But now companies are doing that on their own.
Starlink, if you've heard of that, they provide home internet directly to consumers.
Ooh.
Ooh, very expensive, but must be fast.
Yeah, and it's going from business to business. from business to business to business to consumers.
And space, it's not just for governments and corporations talking to each other anymore.
There's now this invisible layer that powers the consumer services that we rely on in our daily lives, every day.
And that's what I meant when I started talking about this is that I think it's things that we don't necessarily realize are benefiting us, because they're kind of out of sight, they're way up there above our heads, but they are absolutely a part of our lives.
Okay.
So we want it, we love it, but we don't know whether or not we're there to be.
You know, standing there being excited about the benefit it can bring to us, especially the flourishing of the commercial space industry that can benefit us.
So let's start from the beginning.
The beginning of this industry would be the making, the manufacturing of the rocket, of the satellite, and also the launching of it.
Where are we now in that phase?
Well, I think when it comes to, for example, the manufacturing of the satellites or rockets, all of the satellites, it is now moving away from Just a very customized satellite model.
Like, for example, if I want a satellite say, if I'm a company, I want a satellite I have to design from scratch and then order at a very specific factory for them to manufacture.
And then it's more of a very tailor-made product.
But now I think for a lot of these satellites, they are moving towards a mass production phase.
For example, we have different bases, basically here in China, in Shanghai, in Sichuan, in some other provinces.
They have different bases with satellites, different companies and manufacturing overseeing different parts of the assembly line that, for example, in Shanghai's Songjiang they have over 50 such companies that form a whole cluster, so that they can produce one satellite within one and a half days.
So it's a very fast process and also very standardized.
So we're not talking about, For example, in the past.
It's not like a Mars mission that only a government is only able to do that.
Also cheaper?
Yeah, also cheaper.
You can imagine only within one and a half days, with annual capacity expected to reach 300 by the end of this year, meaning one factory is able to produce 300 satellites.
This is a scale industry.
It's like producing... a little bit of more expensive machine for us.
Yeah, and the reusability factor is one that brings the cost way down.
That company that I mentioned before, Landspace, they have...
A rocket, oh, the name of it escapes me right now.
Zhuque.
Zhuque.
It's a legendary or mythology bird.
Flying up.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's kind of what this is.
The Zhuque 3.
So they have that rocket.
Landspace has that rocket.
And yeah, so your traditional rockets, you use them once and then they're done.
But this particular one, it's a liquid oxygen methane rocket.
And I don't know exactly what that means.
But what I do know is that it's designed to be reusable.
And it's the difference between, you know, think of it like your grocery bag.
You go and take a plastic bag from the grocery store, you throw it away.
Well, no, you bring your own bag and you reuse it again and again.
Same concept with these rockets.
Now, because of that. they had a targeted launch price of under 20,000 yuan.
That's about $2,500 per kilogram.
And that matches SpaceX's Falcon 4, which is approximately $3,000 per kilogram.
So that particular event And having it priced that way, this was a big moment for China because this kind of marked the country's entry into the reusable rocket era.
And this is a huge game changer for low cost access to space, especially for international payloads developing countries.
And when I learned about that developing countries aspect of it, I thought what's the difference there?
I don't quite understand.
Well, the difference is this.
A developing country, in this case, wouldn't need their own rocket.
They don't have to spend billions to develop their own space program.
They can just kind of I don't know how to put it, buy a ticket?
Like a bus ticket on a Chinese craft that would launch their satellite for them.
And for the developing countries, that means they can have satellites in space too.
Help their farmers, like we mentioned before, to have their own GPS systems or whatever it is that they want their satellites to do.
It just kind of helps to level the playing field for a lot of countries that otherwise wouldn't have had the money to invest in their own space program.
Yes.
And when we talk about scale, the company we mentioned at the very beginning, the company that has successfully retreat the suborbital satellite in the very beginning of our conversation they, as of December 2025, the company CAS their Legion 1, has successfully completed 11 launch missions and accurately delivering a total of 84 satellites annually into their designed orbits, with a cumulative payload mass exceeding 11 metric tons.
So a satellite from any developing country who wants to do a certain experiment that would definitely give a boost to one of their industries can be one of the 84 satellites we're talking about.
And one thing that we mentioned in the very beginning of the conversation was that it's vital that we can get the satellite back successfully, so we can get the things from the satellite back.
But at the same time, with as many reusable satellite maybe not retrievable, but you send it out and you need to maintain it in a way and collect the data from it, which was the point of the experiment.
That is also a very important and another part of the industry.
Yeah um, and also speaking of side lies, it made me think of you know, a lot of people would have that question of why do I need a satellite?
Not only in navigation, but I think about, for example, in really high-tech weather monitoring.
Disasters, yeah.
We receive on our phones about, for example, the weather forecast.
We constantly receive currently on our phones every day.
It's actually powered by a lot of these satellite networks in the orbit.
And right now we have, like different constellation, meaning different satellite networks working together and providing such services to the general public.
So I think in these terms, these sidelines, gives more significance when it comes to, you know, developing countries, as Steve mentioned that they also need.
I think they need such services more than many, many other people in the world right now.
When it comes to you know.
Getting to know emergencies, getting to know their weather conditions on a daily basis.
Sorry, you were talking about just everyday weather reports.
And yeah, that's absolutely true.
I said disasters because that's part of it too, disaster prevention.
When you can track weather patterns and expect what's coming or know what's coming, then you can be a lot more prepared for it.
And we mentioned about doing experiment in space, because now I think it's common knowledge to everyone.
You must have already know this.
When it's in space, the condition is very different.
That is why having sending seeds to the space, sending any kind of agricultural product to space, and then retrieving them and then start growing them, might trigger a certain kind of change in DNA and change the feature of it.
But if not only can we do experiments and change the seed of something, but also if we can manufacture in space.
Yeah, build something in space.
It will be a different thing.
The orbiting factory.
Cool name.
Well, so I think this word, pardon me, came up before microgravity.
And that's what space has that we on Earth don't have.
And that allows for the construction of things differently.
Um, in space, and that's where companies can test how to make materials or medicines, or 3d printed parts.
I said that printer right.
Um, they are better or they are stronger because they don't have the pull of gravity.
Um, and again, i didn't know what that meant, so i had to search and figure it out.
So, on earth, gravity makes everything sink right, it's heavy, it makes us heavy And it makes liquids have a top and a bottom as well.
And it pulls on things as they're being made.
And that can weaken their structure.
But here's the difference in microgravity.
A solid, a liquid, or a gas can all float and be mixed together perfectly.
There is no top and bottom for the liquids because of the lack of gravity.
So what that means is you can create a perfect metal alloy or a perfect metal alloy ball, for example, because the metals they will not separate.
And then you can 3D print these delicate structures and they won't collapse under their own weight, because there is no weight.
Right.
That's what the difference in construction is.
So microgravity, it's this weightless environment.
And it allows us to mix and grow and build things without the constant downward pull of gravity to kind of mess up the process.
Yeah.
And also when it comes to other different technologies, like in medicine.
I think a lot of researchers are looking to do their experiments in really advanced medicines.
For example, there is a certain protein crystals that can grow larger and more perfectly without gravity pulling them out of shape.
So a tiny vital of this very perfect crystals can be worth millions of pharmaceutical research.
So in these terms, it would be a very perfect lab for these researchers out there.
And those are the things that you would bring back to Earth, right?
But for other things.
You would build them in outer space in that microgravity environment, and then think well wait, I have to bring it back to Earth eventually.
No, well, for a lot of things that they'll build, they'll use them out there.
So it's like...
How could I explain it?
If you needed something on a space station, instead of like, okay, let's say a cake, right?
Instead of bringing the very delicate cake from Earth up to the space station, you'd bring the flour and the mixer and then build the cake up there.
Does it mean in the future we'll be able to, you know, stay in space and live in space?
Yeah, maybe one day.
Migrate to space?
I remember when I was doing a report on lunar probes that some scientists are talking about.
We need a base on the moon.
Why do I need a base on the moon?
They're saying that there can be a place not only for us to live, for us to do experiments, can be a base for humans, to see it as a transportation hub.
On the way to Mars.
Yeah, on the way to Mars or launch our own rockets from the moon.
So that's why we need a base.
So for those functions to be able to have, we also need other supporting services.
Like we need food, we need water.
We need a whole basically living support on that base.
So from the very beginning, we... build the rockets and satellites.
We send them up.
And then we started to experiment on them.
And then we have invisible infrastructure doing satellite manufacturing in space.
And now we are talking about space manufacturing, in the sense that we can build things on space, in space, so that we can use them in the space.
And the reason we're talking about all these, not only because it's the right logic of exploring the space and being able to live there someday, but also because we did already mention all of the examples that are actually happening or have already happened in China's commercial space industry.
These successful companies Trials or successful already examples showcase that we are kind of there.
So the next step might be space travel, space tourism yeah yeah, i think we're gonna see space tourism before we see, you know, live renting an apartment on the moon or something like that.
Because space tourism, i mean, it's already happening.
Yeah exactly, they sold tickets.
So it's really expensive.
It's like they sold tickets here.
Right, they were a million, were they a million?
You, I think, a million yuan per ticket.
But that won't be happening until either 2027 or 2028.
So we still have to wait a couple of years.
This is the part of the industry, though, that everybody's most excited about, I think.
But still, I think for a lot of people it's still out of reach, because a million yuan ticket is still quite expensive.
Maybe, with the reusable technologies that we just mentioned, or manufacturing in the space and use it in the space, counts to also lower the price for those tickets as well.
Lower the price, and then you've got other factors, like the trust factor.
You know um, do people feel comfortable getting in a rocket and going to space?
Maybe, maybe not.
Oh, wait a minute.
If that rocket goes up, it has to come back safely too.
Um, there's a company though, called interstellar, and they just um built a reusable spacecraft.
I think it's called the cyz1.
And this is pretty cool.
That spacecraft can carry up to seven passengers and they tested it.
And what they were testing for was a landing cushion system.
And it's a cloud sensing landing system.
So what that is is it makes sure that the cabin can touch down gently so that it's safe for tourists who haven't gone through astronaut training.
Yes.
So I think we've covered the different steps of developing the commercial space industry.
We talked from going up there, doing things up there, manufacturing up there, sending things back, but we didn't cover how can different industries the agriculture industry, the medicine related industry and all these industries can, excuse me, take advantage of being able to be a passenger to buy a ticket to space, do what they want to do and come back?
And how can those results from the experiment, how can those achievements benefit our own life?
And maybe some other things we can do in space.
There has been talk about building a data center that takes advantage of the cool weather and the almost unlimited resource, which is the sunlight.
Yes, and those can probably happen.
And, as individual, how do we understand these different missions and what are some current challenges and also why, this year, anything policy-wise that worth our attention that has give the vital booster of the commercial space industry and i think that is for another topic on Roundtable.
We will cover that.
