China Launches Its Own Satellite Internet To Rival Elon Musk’s Starlink China unveiled the first batch of its satellite network on Tuesday to rival SpaceX’s Starlink. China has said that there will be more than 15,000 satellites for low-earth orbit under the group of satellites named ‘Thousand Cells’.
Who will establish global internet access? According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Long March Six A carrier rocket has taken off from the Taiyuan launch center in the north of China’s Shanxi Province, carrying 18 satellites into space in the first stage, a mission that has been said to be a complete success.
According to CCTV, China’s government media organization, China aims to launch 648 satellites into space to complete the first phase of the network by 2025, in line with the goal of global Internet network coverage. China’s satellite constellation is known as the group of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, whose purpose is to provide Internet access.
Two popular names for the space are; Starlink, deployed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and OneWeb, owned by European firm Eutelsat. The mass launch of the Internet shows China’s great ambitions in space. In line with the rivalry between the two countries in technology, Beijing has challenged American dominance in this area.
In 2020, China launched the Baidu network as a cluster of satellites to compete with the US government-owned Global Positioning System-GPS (which is widely used worldwide). This year’s Chang’e-six, sent by China, returned to Earth only on Tuesday to collect samples from the far side of the moon for the first time for exploration. Beijing plans to send a manned mission to Mars by 2033.