13 December 2018
Millennial’s start-up, Spacety, is one of the firms jumping in as Beijing opens its ambitious programme to private enterprise. “There are so many niche markets for satellites,” Yang, the 36-year-old Chief Executive Officer, said in his office at a Chinese Academy of Sciences complex in Beijing, with one of his machines sitting on the table in front of him. “I want to do low Earth orbit satellites in the areas that state-owned enterprises are too big to reach. I don’t want to just be a manufacturer,” Yang said. “I want to build my own network for others to use. I want to be the platform.”
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13 December 2018
The launching ceremony of the first science fiction film jointly financed by Macau and mainland China, titled “Space Intellectual,” was held on 12 December at the Macau University of Science and Technology. “Space Intellectual” will focus on hard science fiction concepts, and will pay tribute to the development and achievement of China’s aerospace industry. Filming is expected to be completed in 2019, with the premiere planned to take place in Macau. The project will also consult with a team of Chinese aerospace experts, including China’s first astronaut in space, Yang Liwei, with “the objective of creating the highest level of realism and a hard science fiction blockbuster that perfectly combines new mainstream cinema with scientific concepts.”
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10 December 2018
On 10 December in Beijing, in the presence of Bernard Larrouturou, the French government’s Director General of Research and Innovation, CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall addressed the preparatory meeting of the French-Chinese joint science and technology committee, where he gave a presentation on space cooperation between the two nations. He also reviewed the initial results from the CFOSat mission. Looking further ahead to new endeavours under this exceptional partnership between France and China, CNES’s President set out a nine-point action plan.
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12 December 2018
Ecommerce giant Alibaba, smart wearables maker Huami, and one of China’s largest esports live streaming platforms Douyu all saw their own satellites launched on Friday last week, making space the final frontier of marketing. Alibaba captured the most attention with a satellite dubbed Tmall International. It carried 1,111 recordings of love confessions from Singles' Day on November 11 - also known as Double 11.
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12 December 2018
By 2019, China will become the first nation on earth to have sent a Lunar probe to the far side (sometimes called the dark side) of the Moon. While Western media coverage tends to ignore or deliberately downplay China’s space achievements, to include the Chang’e 4’s attempt, China has yet again proven that it is dead serious about its deadlines set for its ambitions in space. The ambition to land on the far side of the Moon was articulated by China’s space agencies years ago, and 2018 was set as the year when they would launch. And here we are, in 2018, with another Chinese space mission goal achieved as per the deadline set.
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07 December 2018
SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) were high on the agenda when SKA Organisation Director-General Prof. Philip Diamond travelled to China this week to meet the deputy mayor of Shanghai’s Municipal Government, Qing Wu. After receiving an overview of the current progress of the project, Mr Wu confirmed that the Shanghai Municipal Government will support the building of a Chinese SKA data centre, part of a global network of computing centres which will store and provide access to SKA science data products for astronomers around the world.
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