When I was growing up in the 1980s, China’s factories were mostly known for churning out cheap clothes and toys.
By the 2000s, it was televisions and smartphones.
Today, China has become the world’s largest car exporter. The country shipped more than 5 million vehicles last year, overtaking both Japan and Germany.
Now Beijing wants to repeat that success with rockets and satellites.
And if it’s able to pull this off, then the U.S. won’t just be facing competition for the future of the auto industry…
We’ll be up against a rival that can outbuild and outlaunch us in the race to control space.
Using the Auto Playbook for Space
For decades, building a rocket meant building it from scratch.
No two were exactly alike. Satellites could take years to assemble and every bolt and circuit was tested by hand.
That’s why rocket launches were rare, costly and limited to a handful of countries.
But according to the South China Morning Post, China’s state aerospace companies are throwing out the old “prototype” mindset and replacing it with a factory model.
This new model is built on speed, standardization and scale.
Part of that shift is something they call “final assembly pull.” Instead of stockpiling parts, components arrive just in time, pulled into assembly the moment they’re needed.
It’s the same method that their auto plants use to crank out cars by the millions. And Geely, the Chinese carmaker that owns Volvo, is already putting it into practice.
At its Taizhou facility, its space division Geespace says it can build a satellite in just 28 days.
To put that in perspective, this process used to take anywhere from six months to three years.
So how are they speeding up this process?
By using the same playbook China used to leapfrog the West in autos and consumer electronics.
They are standardizing what used to be custom-built.
Geespace isn’t treating satellites like one-off engineering projects. Instead, the company uses modular designs that can be swapped in and out, along with AI-driven inspections that catch flaws automatically instead of relying on long human testing cycles.
According to company documents, this simple but radical approach should cut costs by 45% while increasing output by 300%.
And it seems to be working…
Because they’ve already launched 41 of these satellites into orbit.
Image: zgh.com
And Geely isn’t the only one taking this approach.
Another private firm, Galaxy Space, built a factory in Nantong designed to crank out more than 300 satellites a year.
That’s not far off from the annual output of some of the biggest names in the U.S. aerospace sector.
Clearly, China is betting that rockets and satellites can roll off of factory floors with the same efficiency as sedans.
But they’re building toward something even bigger.
According to Morgan Stanley, the global space economy is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2030.
Some estimates go even higher…
Bank of America pegs it closer to $1.4 trillion.
But most of that growth won’t come from rockets themselves.
It will come from the services those rockets enable, like communications, earth observation, military surveillance, autonomous vehicles, satellite broadband, AI data links, precision agriculture and even space-based energy.
That means whoever builds the cheapest pipeline to orbit will own the platforms every other industry runs on.
And that’s why China is racing to deploy Guowang, a mega-constellation of more than 13,000 satellites that’s a direct challenge to SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Although Elon Musk’s approach to manufacturing rockets couldn’t be more different.
SpaceX built its dominance through reuse of its rockets. Falcon 9 boosters now land and fly again in weeks, dramatically lowering the cost of access to orbit.
But China believes it can flood low Earth orbit with satellites in record time with mass production. Because if you can mass-produce rockets and satellites cheaply enough, then you don’t need to reuse them.
You can just build more.
It also helps that China has a structural advantage. It’s already proven with steel, electronics and autos that knows how to scale factories. And once it starts spinning those flywheels, Western companies usually struggle to keep up with China’s pace.
This means China’s new industrial revolution could change the balance of power above Earth.
Because in an industrialized space race, the advantage goes to whoever has the most efficient production lines.
Here’s My Take
China’s approach should concern you, but rockets and satellites are far less forgiving than autos.
After all, you can recall a car. But you can’t recall a satellite that’s drifting dead in orbit.
China also faces bottlenecks in high-end components.
The world’s supply of advanced sensors, radiation-hardened chips and specialty materials is still largely dominated by the U.S., Japan and Europe.
So China can build all the factories it wants. But if it can’t secure a supply chain, then it can only scale so far.
Still, it’s clear that Beijing is looking at space as an industry it can standardize. And it wants to dominate this industry the same way it currently dominates with autos.
If China succeeds, then rockets won’t remain marvels of human engineering…
They’ll simply be commodities.
And if the U.S. doesn’t step up its pace, we could find ourselves falling behind in the race to conquer space.
Regards,
Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing
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