Yes. My browser stayed in this page for too long time and I didn't notice that some else had posted this news.
China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
escobar
Brigadier
They are huge in size and are a group of "heavyweight" satellites.
CALT described these as "huge in size and are a group of "heavyweight" satellites"
@Jiang ZeminFanboy
I didn't think GW would be 100% civillian either, there are already several separate constellations for that.
The truth is the milspace meta has already shifted from launching big expensive and difficult to manufacture satellites towards this architecture (see what the US are doing and what Europe is planning).
Imo this is a new program altogether, like Shijian, TJS or Yaogan. So the reality is there could be satellites for all kinds of different purposes within this program.
This will be a large scale resilient architecture and probably have the ability to work together with future assets (eg. Beidou-4 nav which will also have a LEO component).
Also these sats are part of what's called 星网
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The GW sats in this launch are 600kg each in the photo. GW is the sats' designation in orbit registration. The constallation in Chinese is called "星网", SatNet.
The total mass is 6T, adding deployment device it would be close to or more than 7T. YZ-2 wet mass is 8T. That is 14T. Then the orbit is much higher than Tiangong station's 400km, that reduces the total payload mass of 22T. So the launch using CZ-5 is simply the reason of payload demand.
Also worth to remember is that, SatNet is different from all other constellations including Starlink and G60, it consists of high, medium and low orbit. The higher the orbit, the heavier and larger the sat is or can be. The higher orbit sat has higher bandwidth, larger antenna and bigger size. They serve as trunk router/hub. Even in the same orbit, a heavier sat can afford more transmitters for better switching/routing etc. Unless we know more about its archetecture, there is nothing to be surprised or speculated.
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hmm.. CASC has confirmed there will be more Long March 5B launches of SatNet.
The talk about "military vs. civillian" space asset is really just a propaganda talk point by the US. There is no difference between a civilian and millitary space camera or internet communication sat. They do the same job as Starlink is already doing in Ukraine, and all the drones and pickup trucks.
Taikonauts Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong have performed the longest EVA (space walk) in human history, as part of the Shenzhou 19 mission to the Tiangong space station. They were in space a total of nine hours and six minutes, surpassing the previous record, held by NASA in March 2001, by ten minutes.
