Satellite "New Infrastructure" Commercialization Speeds Up Manufacturing Industry Chain Needs To Be Improved

From a global perspective, the commercialization of space industry is accelerating in an all-round way.

On November 25th, SpaceX plans to push its starship development to the next important stage: a flight altitude of 15km (50000 feet), which will far exceed the maximum test altitude of previous starship prototypes. The space center has been manned by four astronauts from Kennedy Space Company. This is an important practice for commercial aerospace to explore the direction of manned space flight.

On the other hand, domestic commercial aerospace industry has also made new progress. Recently, the first commercial aerospace industrial base has landed in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, and 12 formal project investment agreements have been signed, with a total investment of 7.855 billion yuan; there are more than 50 framework agreements with an intention to invest more than 100 billion yuan.

After the full deployment of beidou-3, the competition in the field of domestic commercial space satellites has entered a new stage. This year, China has brought the satellite Internet into the scope of "new infrastructure" and upgraded it to a national strategic project. In the face of considerable development prospects, in recent years, China has emerged a number of excellent commercial aerospace enterprises.

"At present, the commercial satellite industry is still in the initial stage of investment. The whole market potential has not been fully explored, and it is in the stage of rapid growth. Now, it is basically a double-digit growth rate." Wang Yang, founder of spacetime Daoyu, revealed in an exclusive interview with the 21st century economic reporter that commercial satellites have been providing basic services for many industries, such as Beidou navigation of mobile phones, unmanned driving and other fields.

Commercial aerospace enters fast lane

McKinsey pointed out in a report that the global output value of Satellite Internet is expected to reach $560 billion to $850 billion by 2025. Up to now, the number of commercial aerospace enterprises in China has exceeded 160, involving rocket, satellite and other supporting and overall manufacturing, satellite measurement and control, ground equipment manufacturing, communication satellite and remote sensing satellite operation services. More and more private capital and entrepreneurs began to enter this field.

Before he founded spacetime Daoyu, Wang Yang worked in the Institute of microsatellite innovation of Chinese Academy of Sciences for nearly ten years. As the first tier commercial satellite company in China, spacetime Daoyu belongs to Geely technology group. At present, spacetime Daoyu has the capability of product level design and mass production delivery of microsatellites, and has accumulated more than 150 invention patents. In addition to satellite manufacturing, its business scope also involves the whole industry chain of satellite ground equipment manufacturing, satellite operation and application.

Among them, the core satellite application business is composed of satellite operation service industry and ground equipment manufacturing industry, and the total proportion of them is as high as 90.7% in 2019. Among them, application service is the most important source of profit, and also the biggest problem faced by private commercial aerospace.

"Commercial aerospace must first meet the needs of users, and then create value before it can make profits, so as to maintain its survival. Our first goal is to become the first echelon of Commercial Aerospace Satellite manufacturing, and the second goal is to establish our own space positioning and communication system. In addition, around the application scenarios of commercial aerospace, we have carried out the layout for two years, with the goal of satellite manufacturing, spatial information infrastructure operation, and terminal solutions Wang Yang revealed that the company has formed positive cash flow in the second year after its start-up.

In March this year, the company's satellite production base in Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, has officially started. It covers satellite R & D center, component manufacturing center, measurement and control center, cloud computing big data platform and other facilities. It is planned to invest 2.27 billion yuan to achieve an annual output of 500 satellites by 2025.

From technology research and development to offline factories, the industrial chain layout of commercial satellite industry is becoming more and more intensive. "The factory is actually the core barrier, accounting for about 10% of the total R & D cost, which is not too high." Wang Yang explained that the current industry competition is not fierce. Although there are more commercial satellite companies, there are not many companies with basic R & D capabilities. We will not rush to challenge this track.

Accelerate the development of industrial chain cluster

Since the beginning of the year, a number of private satellite companies have built satellite factories in order to achieve large-scale production, but the supply chain bottleneck restricts the mass production target.

"Satellite industry involves rocket manufacturing, propellant production, satellite manufacturing, satellite launching, satellite application (communication, navigation, remote sensing), etc., and the application industry chain is actually very long. There are already hundreds of satellites in operation in China. How to make good use of these satellites and develop and create greater commercial value is the focus of satellite application industry and market docking Wang Yang further added.

In the future, in order to develop the commercial satellite industry, it is necessary to strengthen the guidance of industrial chain cluster. In the aspect of satellite manufacturing, the development and design of various types of satellites, key materials and the field of single machine have also derived relevant opportunities of industrial chain. In addition to rocket capacity improvement, launch scheduling, more mature supply chain, mature data services will also have a positive impact on the industry.

According to the analysis report of Huatai Securities, the design, R & D and manufacturing of satellites have very high access threshold, which requires a large amount of investment and technology accumulation. In the past, the development of satellite research and development was usually driven by the investment in the national aerospace field. The non market competition environment has pushed up the cost of satellite manufacturing, and also raised the threshold of capital investment in the satellite industry chain, which is hindered to a certain extent The development of commercial aerospace. With the development of aerospace technology, the cost of space launch has been reduced. With the advantages of short development cycle, low cost and flexible launch mode, the application potential of microsatellites has been continuously exploited and will be paid more and more attention.

According to the Research Report of space angels, an early-stage investment agency in the aerospace field, global space venture companies have been financing year by year since 2009. In the past decade, more than 530 start-ups have obtained financing, with a total amount of about US $25.7 billion. In the field of satellite and application industry, in October this year, when China Aerospace Science and engineering released a relevant report, it stressed that it is necessary to promote the layout of satellite low-cost mass manufacturing industry chain, continuously develop series of characteristic payload products, and promote the application of space information to serve the national economic and social development and the daily life of the public.

At the same time, Lei Kaiping, executive deputy director of the military civilian integration office of Sichuan provincial Party committee, once mentioned that the problems of Beidou industry include insufficient overall planning and integration of resources, insufficient integration of spatial geographic information, and insufficient public perception. This is reflected in the lack of effective integration of Beidou navigation and high resolution, satellite communication, earth information and other data information, and the role and benefits of Beidou space-time big data have not been fully played.

In the near future, 60% of the self driving vehicles in the Chinese market will realize driverless shared travel mode, which will be a strong proof of the value of Beidou spatiotemporal data. In the future, LEO satellite constellation based on Beidou system will provide higher precision positioning service as application support.

Spacetime Daoyu is also actively participating in the demonstration of the next generation Beidou navigation satellite system. The open-source satellite system, as an open-source system, belongs to the category of open-source system, which can be built at the bottom of the open-source platform, and the software developers should pay more attention to the open-source system Specific commercial application scenarios, so as to build a variety of commercial aerospace formats simply and flexibly.

In the future, commercial LEO satellites will also be widely used in intelligent transportation, UAV logistics, environmental monitoring and other b-terminals, to build an ecosystem that can enable all industries in China.