From July 27 to August 13, 2025, China's space program staged a breathtaking "space relay race": At the Taiyuan Launch Site, the Long March 6A rocket carried the "Internet Low Earth Orbit 05 Group Satellites" into space; four days later, at the Hainan Commercial Aerospace Launch Site, the Long March 8A launched the 06 Group satellites piercing through the sky; five days after that, the Long March 12 rocket carried the 07 Group satellites for ignition and takeoff; on August 13, the Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket delivered the 08 Group satellites precisely into orbit from Wenchang. Within just 17 days, four rockets were launched in succession, with an average of one launch every 4.3 days, demonstrating the "Chinese speed" in the space race through action.
Behind this intensive launch campaign is a battle for national destiny over space resources. According to regulations by the International Telecommunication Union, low-Earth orbit constellations must deploy 1,500 satellites by the end of 2027 to secure valuable frequency band resources. Faced with the reality that global low-Earth orbit capacity is only about 60,000 slots, China's "Thousand Sails Constellation" plan aims to deploy 15,000 satellites, second only to SpaceX's Starlink system. Clearly, China is racing against time to build a low-Earth orbit internet satellite network. Some may wonder why China, with its highly developed 5G technology, still needs internet satellites. In fact, this is closely related to a country's strategic potential.
Low-Earth orbit satellites are the nerve centers of unmanned battlefields, driving revolutionary changes in the rules of warfare. In the complex electronic environment of the future, existing geostationary communication satellites can no longer meet the demand for large numbers of unmanned combat systems operating in the same area. The core value of low-Earth orbit internet satellites lies in building a "nerve center" for the era of unmanned warfare, enabling real-time coordination and intelligent decision-making across all unmanned equipment through high-speed, low-latency space-based communication networks.
The signal round-trip delay of low-Earth orbit satellites is only 20-50 milliseconds, far less than the 600 milliseconds delay of geostationary orbit satellites, supporting real-time control of high-dynamic targets such as drone swarms and unmanned boats. Their wide bandwidth capability meets the requirements for high-definition video transmission and multi-target data fusion, providing battlefield "holistic perception" capabilities. China's low-Earth orbit constellation can simultaneously command hundreds of unmanned platforms, breaking through traditional data link bandwidth limitations, achieving saturation strikes across land, sea, air, and space.
Through large-scale constellation networking, single-point failures do not affect the overall functionality of the system, increasing the resilience of battlefield communications by more than ten times, and covering traditional communication blind spots such as the poles and oceans, with communication stability reaching 98%. Low-Earth orbit satellite constellations have propelled unmanned warfare into the "second-level response" era, whose significance is no less than that of the internal combustion engine in reshaping mechanized warfare. When 15,000 satellites weave an intelligent sky net, the scale, decision speed, and survival capability of unmanned equipment will undergo a qualitative change.
When the tail flame of the Long March 5B rocket illuminated the night sky of Wenchang, China was weaving an invisible intelligent war neural network in space. From the Beidou collars on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia to laser submarine mirrors diving deep into the ocean, low-Earth orbit satellite constellations are forging land, sea, air, and space into a unified living entity. The outcome of future battles may already be decided before satellites are launched — when a large number of low-Earth orbit satellites hover in the sky, every corner of the Earth will be under the watchful eye of the data chain's sky eye. And this 17-day, four-launch space sprint is merely the first heavy blow that China has struck to open the door to future warfare.
Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7540115138947383846/
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