China's Space Program Is Bigger Than You Think
China’s Space Program Is
Bigger Than You Think
93 launches in a single year. Nearly 28,000 satellites planned. A reusable booster that came down within meters of the pad. While the headlines chased Starship, China quietly built the second-largest space industry on Earth — and it’s accelerating.
But here’s the part they miss:
the country in second place just had the biggest year in its history — and it isn’t slowing down.
There’s a number from 2025 that I think most people would guess wrong by roughly half. It’s the number of times China launched a rocket into orbit: ninety-three. Not a typo, not a cumulative total, not “announced.” Ninety-three rockets, in twelve months, actually flown.
I went into this expecting to write the familiar story — China is catching up, but it’s still years behind. By the time I’d finished pulling the 2025 numbers, I’d quietly deleted that framing. “Catching up” undersells it. China didn’t just have a good year in space; it had a record-shattering one, and then announced 2026 would be busier. This is Part 1 of two: here we look at the machine — the launches, the satellites, the rockets, the companies. Part 2 looks at what China plans to do with it.
up from 68 in 2024
megaconstellations
the U.S. and China
The Headline Number: 93 Launches in One Year
Let’s start with the stat that should make you sit up. In 2025, China conducted a national-record number of orbital launches — CASC, the main state contractor, reported 93 missions for the country, while independent trackers logged it at around 92. Either way, it shattered the previous record of 68 set in 2024, and China’s annual launch count has now increased every single year since 2019.
For context: the state-owned giant CASC alone flew 73 of those missions and lofted more than 300 spacecraft into orbit. That’s not a research program with occasional launches. That’s an industrial cadence.
The interesting part isn’t that the U.S. still launches more — it does, and by a healthy margin, almost entirely thanks to SpaceX’s 165 Falcon 9 flights. The interesting part is that the United States and China together accounted for roughly 88% of all orbital launches on the planet in 2025. Everyone else — Europe, Russia, India, Japan, the whole rest of the world — is fighting over the remaining sliver. Space, in 2025, became a two-country story. And one of those countries is the one we tend to wave off.
The Part Almost Everyone Misses: The Megaconstellations
Here’s where it stops being a launch-count trivia question and starts being strategy. A large chunk of those 2025 launches weren’t science missions or one-off satellites. They were bricks in two enormous walls China is building in low Earth orbit — its answer to Starlink.
There are two flagship programs, and the numbers in their regulatory filings are genuinely hard to process. Guowang (“national network,” run by state-owned China SatNet) has filed for 12,992 satellites. Qianfan (“Thousand Sails,” backed by the Shanghai government, formerly nicknamed “G60 Starlink”) is targeting 15,000. That’s nearly 28,000 satellites between just those two — and a third commercial constellation, LandSpace’s Honghu-3, adds another 10,000 to the wishlist.
Now, here’s the honest counterweight — and it matters. As of December 2025, Guowang had only around 136 operational satellites in orbit, and Qianfan roughly 108. Against targets in the tens of thousands, that’s a rounding error. So no, China hasn’t built a Starlink rival yet. Not even close.
But what struck me digging into this is the regulatory clock. To keep their international spectrum rights, these constellations face ITU deadlines — Guowang reportedly needs about 10% of its fleet up by 2029 and half by 2032. That’s not a vague aspiration; it’s a use-it-or-lose-it countdown. Which means the launch cadence we just looked at isn’t peaking. It pretty much has to keep climbing. The 93 launches of 2025 may end up looking quaint.
Analysts widely treat Guowang and Qianfan as dual-use national infrastructure, not pure consumer broadband plays. Starlink’s role in Ukraine was a wake-up call: a resilient, sovereign satellite-internet layer has obvious strategic value. That’s a big reason these projects get guaranteed funding and priority launch slots — they’re treated as critical infrastructure, not a side business.
The Missing Piece: Reusable Rockets (and a Spectacular Fireball)
Now for the honest weakness — and it’s the very thing that makes those 28,000-satellite plans look almost reckless. Until recently, China could not do the one trick that makes mass deployment affordable: reuse a rocket. SpaceX’s entire cost advantage comes from landing and reflying boosters, sometimes 20-plus times each. For all its cadence, China was still throwing its rockets away after every flight.
That started to change on December 3, 2025, and the way it changed is almost cinematic. The private company LandSpace launched Zhuque-3 — a stainless-steel, methane-fueled, nine-engine rocket that looks suspiciously like a Falcon 9 — on its maiden flight. It reached orbit successfully. Then it tried to land the booster… and the first stage came down within meters of its target pad before erupting into a dramatic fireball.
Here’s the thing, though: landing “within meters” on your very first try is, by aerospace standards, breathtakingly close. LandSpace called the flight a success because the recovery system, engine throttling, and attitude control all worked — it was the final touchdown burn that failed. The company has since announced a second recovery attempt for Q2 2026 and aims to actually re-fly a recovered booster by the end of 2026.
And Zhuque-3 isn’t alone — it’s the opening act. A whole wave of Chinese reusable rockets is queuing up: the state-built Long March 12A, Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3 (an even more direct Falcon 9 near-clone), and others. Honestly, my bet is that 2026 is the year China stops being the country that can’t land a rocket. The interesting question is no longer whether they’ll crack reusability, but how fast they ride down the cost curve once they do.
The Companies Actually Doing It
One reason China’s scale gets underestimated abroad is that the names aren’t household ones. There’s no single “Chinese SpaceX.” Instead there’s a two-tier ecosystem: enormous state contractors doing the heavy lifting, and a fast-growing commercial layer being deliberately cultivated to chase reusability and cost. Here’s the cast.
The Caveats You Should Keep in Mind
I’d be doing you a disservice if I left you thinking China has already won. It hasn’t, and there are real gaps. So let me be straight about three of them.
Nobody outside Beijing really knows what China spends on space. The most-cited independent estimate (Euroconsult) put it around $12 billion for 2022 — below NASA’s budget — but analysts openly admit the true figure could be substantially higher and is essentially impossible to pin down. Treat any precise spending comparison with suspicion, including ones you’ll see quoted confidently elsewhere.
As of mid-2026, China has not yet recovered and reflown an orbital booster. SpaceX has done it hundreds of times. Until Zhuque-3 (or a rival) actually lands and re-flies, China’s per-launch economics remain far worse than SpaceX’s — which is exactly why those 28,000-satellite plans are so hard to fund through launch alone.
93 launches is a record — and still barely half of the 165 Falcon 9 flights SpaceX alone managed. Closing that gap requires not just more rockets but cheaper, reusable ones at factory scale. That’s the same wall every aspiring space power hits, and China hasn’t cleared it yet.
“Bigger than you think” isn’t hype — it’s a correction. In 2025 China flew a record 93 missions, started building two of the largest satellite constellations ever proposed, and came within meters of landing its first reusable booster. The mental model where it’s a distant runner-up is years out of date. The gaps are real — no proven reusability yet, an opaque budget, a cadence still well behind SpaceX — but every one of them is a problem China is now visibly, methodically closing. And here’s the catch: everything above is just the machine. What China plans to do with that machine — put humans on the Moon by 2030, and haul home pieces of asteroids and Mars — is arguably the more audacious half of the story. That’s Part 2.
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