All Weather Friends: China and Pakistan Space Cooperation
30 January 2020
Pakistan’s space program is set to benefit greatly from China’s advanced technology. In 1991, the Chinese Ministry of Aerospace Industry and SUPARCO signed an agreement on space cooperation, but for decades they had little to show for it. Space cooperation between China and Pakistan focused mainly on “personnel training and infrastructure development” for the next 20 years. With the inclusion of India and Pakistan in both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and SAARC, these South Asian countries have a major positive role to play in space rather than countering each other. If India and Pakistan follow a path of confrontation on future space projects, it will only deepen the cooperation between Pakistan and China.
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China on Its Way to Becoming a Formidable Satellite Internet Service Competitor
29 January 2020
In a study of the Internet in China in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I [Larry Press] observed that "China has been able to execute plans effectively by allocating resources to competing, government-owned enterprises," and Kai-Fu Lee shows that they have pursued a similar strategy with respect to AI. Now they are doing the same with low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband satellite constellations.
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The man behind China’s signature project talks about how it was to built FAST
22 January 2020
Jiang Peng is the chief engineer of China's Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), known as the China sky eye, which started formal operation on January 11 in Southwest China's Guizhou Province. Jiang completed his doctoral study in 2009. He was faced with choices of continuing his studies or finding something challenging and intriguing to do, Jiang said in a forum held by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Then he saw a job recruitment advertisement for FAST - a project to design and build a transformable cable net structure 500 meters in diameter with millimeter scale accuracy. Jiang firstly thought the advertisement might be a fraud since it seemed impossible to design such a structure at that time. But an attached official document released by the National Reform and Development Commission told him it is a real and significant science and technology project.
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Assessing China’s commercial space industry
27 January 2020
Jeff Foust of TheSpaceReview takes a look at the current status of commercial space activities in China. He thinks that "the closest competitor to the United States in entrepreneurial space might be China. Dozens of startups have emerged in just the last few years, pursuing everything from launch vehicles to constellations of communications or remote sensing satellites, much like their American counterparts. The rise of China’s overall economy to one of the largest in the world has prompted questions about whether these Chinese space startups could pose serious competition to American companies."
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