10 April 2018
Beijing-based military expert Zhou Chenming said Vanuatu would not be suitable for a military base, but China was planning to test more rockets – many of which come down in the sparsely populated South Pacific – and would need a monitoring and control station in the region. “China needs a space control station in the South Pacific because it is going to launch more heavy rockets,” Zhou said.
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09 April 2018
Taikonaut Chen Dong said in an interview with China Central Television (CCTV) that the space station era has set higher requirements for the astronauts. "The manned space program has entered the space station era, which means that the astronauts will stay in space for a longer time with more tasks to be performed. This has set higher requirements for our physical condition, knowledge, mental status and skills, and brought more challenges," said Chen, who carried out Shenzhou-11 mission in 2016.
MORE on CCTV ... (interview in Mandarin but storyline in English)

05 April 2018
China's domestically-produced satellite navigation system BeiDou is said to have made significant progress on its accuracy. At a press conference on Tuesday, BeiDou engineers claimed that a new accurate positioning chip can now help users arrive at their destinations with an error margin of just one to two meters. The positioning accuracy improved from 10 meters to within one to two meters, allowing to distinguish the difference between the main highway and a side road. All this is now possible with the release of a new accurate positioning chip from China's very own satellite navigation system BeiDou.
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09 April 2018
Software-based satellitea, which takes advantage of the internet's open source, can work in a way similar to the Android operating system to research and develop its software and hardware. Customers can use the platform to develop, test and debug software. "The satellite Tianzhi 1 will be sent mainly to lay the foundation for a network and to test key technologies for the software-defined satellite system. We are planning to send one satellite each year to enrich the system,"  Zhao Junsuo, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Software where the satellite was developed, told the Global Times on 08 April.
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photos of Tianzhi 1 on the CCTV website