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Privately funded space startups are changing China's space industry, helping it become a space power on par with the United States. "2018 is shaping up to be the first year in which more rockets reach Earth orbit from China than from any other country," reports MIT Technology Review. "As of mid-December, China had made 35 successful launches, as against 30 for the U.S."

"As American and Russian space programs struggle with uncertain budgets, China is expanding its efforts on every front: communications and reconnaissance satellites; a navigation and positioning constellation to rival America's GPS; a human spaceflight program; and ambitious space-science and robotic exploration projects. All of these are enabled by a menagerie of new rockets with advanced capabilities." Here's an excerpt from the report summarizing some of China's space ambitions: In 2014, the Chinese government decided to allow private investment in space-related industry. Landspace began with a few dozen people. It now has over 200 employees at a manufacturing base in Huzhou in eastern China and at assembly and testing facilities in X'ian, a central Chinese city. The company plans to work incrementally, beginning with nano-satellites -- devices weighing between 1 and 10 kilograms (2 to 22 pounds) -- then moving to larger cargoes and, eventually, into human spaceflight. In September 2018, iSpace launched three nanosatellites on a brief suborbital flight, becoming the first Chinese space startup to successfully get beyond Earth's atmosphere. Another company, LinkSpace, plans to launch a vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket in 2020. Landspace, OneSpace, iSpace, LinkSpace, and ExPace (which fashions itself as a startup though it's a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise) are the leaders of a bevy of lesser-known Chinese launch startups.

These launch companies are operating hand in hand with a number of new, privately funded Chinese companies that are focused on doing things in space, rather than on getting there. Spacety and Commsat, among others, are planning large constellations of small imagery and communication satellites. Such constellations -- whether Chinese or American -- are transforming aspects of the way space is used. By making low-resolution satellite imagery much cheaper to gather (among other novel applications for small satellites), they are catalyzing an era of more nimble commercial, scientific, and military experimentation.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Brad Lendon reports at CNN that 29 satellites, the most ever launched at one time, will be aboard a single Minotaur I rocket scheduled to lift off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Tuesday night at 7:30 pm. The main payload will be the Air Force's Space Test Program Satellite-3, plus 28 tiny satellites called CubeSats about 4 inches on each side, weighing about 3 pounds and with a volume of about a quart. The cubesats will include Ho`oponopono-2 from the University of Hawaii to continue a long-existing radar calibration service for the 80 plus C-band radar tracking stations distributed around the world. It will also have CAPE-2 from the Cajun Advanced Picosatellite Experiment, to give students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette the opportunity to research, design, develop, and maintain a low earth orbiting satellite, and SwampSat from the University of Florida to advance the TRL (Technology Readiness Level) of CMGs (Control Moment Gyroscopes) appropriate for smallsats. Among the CubeSats is the TJ3Sat, the first satellite made by high-schoolers to go into space, built by the students of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. It will give students and other amateur radio users the opportunity to send and receive data from the satellite. Approved text strings will be transmitted to the satellite, and the resulting voice interpretation will be relayed back to Earth over an amateur radio frequency using the onboard Stensat radio. Orbital says the 29 satellites should achieve orbit in a little less than 12½ minutes after the rocket ignites. NASA says the launch may be visible from northern Florida to southern Canada and as far west as Indiana. Live coverage of the launch is available via UStream beginning at 6:30 p.m. EST on launch day."

An anonymous reader writes "India's first dedicated navigation satellite, the IRNSS-1A, developed by the Indian Space Research Organization, was successfully put in orbit on Monday night. The launch vehicle, PSLV-C22, bearing the 1,425-kg navigation satellite, blasted off the launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Center here at the scheduled lift-off time of 11.41 p.m." The satellite is the first of seven that will eventually provide a regional equivalent of GPS under complete Indian control.

leighklotz writes "The CalPoly CubeSat Program announced a launch date for its 13 amateur satellites: June 28, 2006 at 19:39:11Z, from the Kazakstan Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian DNEPR-1LV rocket. The satellites are made from a kit, and are 10cm cubes." Read on for more info, including links to many of the individual satellite projects.

leighklotz continues: "There are also pictures of 14 satellites and info about some of them:

• ION, University of Illinois
• RINCON, University of Arizona
• ICE Cube 1, Cornell University
• KUTESat [also] University of Kansas
• nCube nCube Norweigian University of Science and Technology
• HAUSAT-1 Hankuk Aviation University
• SEEDS Nihon University
• CP1 and CP2 Cal Poly
• AeroCube 1 The Aerospace Corporation
• Voyager University of Hawaii
• ICE Cube 2 Cornell University

These folks have a list of ongoing CubeSat projects. And as always AMSAT is a good organization to join if you have any interest in using or building your own satellites."