
Private Space Launch Firms in China Race to Orbit - starmanaj
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/private-space-launch-firms-in-china-race-to-orbit
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mlindner
These firms are very questionably private. They're heavily funded by the
Chinese government. Just because there's more than one does not make a company
private.

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sschueller
You could say the same thing about spacex. Most of its contracts are from the
US government.

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spectramax
It is baffling that most people do not know how the Chinese government
interferes with private companies. It is nothing like what we see in the west.
It interferes, subsidizes, promotes, regulates, funds and insures private
companies to the extent that we can just call it Chinese government agency.

That is NOT the case with SpaceX + NASA.

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dvh
What if China launches it's own satellite internet, subsidised by government,
with goal to make it commercially unfeasible for others to launch their own?
Yeah it'll be bit restricted at first but cheap and good enough for normal
people that have "nothing to hide". They would get them done nice tracking
options.

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starmanaj
The (state-owned) main contractor for the Chinese space program, CASC,
launched the first satellite of its planned +300-satellite 'Hongyan' broadband
communications constellation late last year. The aim? Providing global
internet access. How far it goes is hard to say, but none of the western/other
broadband satellites would be able to provide services to China, so there's
that market at least.

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vageli
> How far it goes is hard to say, but none of the western/other broadband
> satellites would be able to provide services to China, so there's that
> market at least.

How would the Chinese government block someone from pointing a satellite dish
at the sky?

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spaceheretostay
One method is that your neighbors may report you. In China, part of the social
credit system is that your neighbors will report you for doing anything
against the law or the rules. So they may not 'block' you from putting it up
and getting internet through it, but try going to work the next day you may be
blocked from getting on the train.

Edit: Everything I said here was strictly factual. I'm not sure why it's so
quickly downvoted so here is a source to back it up:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw).
And one more, regarding the trains in particular:
[http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/china-social-credit-travel-
ban...](http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/china-social-credit-travel-ban/)

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yorwba
Basically any attempt to make statements about "the" social credit system in
China is going to be at least slightly wrong, since there is no single system.
There are several pilots of different possible implementations, but no
complete system yet (both of your sources actually mention this). Some are run
by private financial companies to determine eligibility for their loans, some
are run by city governments to provide credit rating for companies (e.g.
[https://wzcredit.gov.cn/](https://wzcredit.gov.cn/) ) and apparently some
rely on neighbors reporting each other. (This is the first time I heard about
that one, though.)

The blacklist that prevents people from buying high-speed train tickets is
[http://zxgk.court.gov.cn/shixin/](http://zxgk.court.gov.cn/shixin/) and it
usually works as a court-ordered punishment between fines and a prison
sentence. The intention seems to be to target people who owe money and falsely
claim not to have it by preventing their ability to spend it on "luxury." I.e.
if you have the money to take a faster train, they'd prefer it if you used
that to pay your debts.

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socceroos
Yikes, how horrifying

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gboudrias
For the life of me I can't parse that title.

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ChuckMcM
China has contracted with Private Space to pick up entire enterprises and send
them into orbit, thus making the development of a space station in orbit
irrelevant :-) (ok it's Friday alright?)

It is a pretty convoluted title. Perhaps they could have said, "China's
Commercial Space companies are now at the 'blowing up rockets' stage." Which
is the penultimate stage to the one where the rocket gets all the way into
orbit.

It is kind of a weird concept in purely Communist country insomuch as the idea
of commercial space in an open market country is to to capture market capital
and prioritize it to space launch capability. What is harder is that you can't
really sell orbital rockets to third parties (the pesky NPT gets in the way,
and it is generally frowned upon). I would have expected them to go with
something similar to the the setup Russia has with USRC[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Rocket_and_Space_Corpor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Rocket_and_Space_Corporation)

