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Foreigners Will Pay For China's Latest Gains In The Race For Outer Space

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China’s getting better at building a lot of things. The made-in-China product label doesn’t quite turn heads, but it doesn’t make heads shake today like 10 or 20 years ago. Eager to secure its hold as a dominant world economic player, China is shopping out its first mid-sized commercial airliner now. Last year it developed several advanced pieces of weaponry. Now the country that’s also competitive, though secretive, about its mission in outer space is speeding ahead with a satellite program that rates as well as anyone else’s.

China launched January 19 a homegrown Long March 11 carrier rocket to send six satellites into space, state-run China Daily says. A Canadian company’s satellite was among them, the news website says. It called the launch a first for Chinese “solid propellant” rocket as opposed to more complex liquid propellant models and much earlier ones that rely on something like gunpowder.

More on Forbes: What China's Really Doing Up In Space

The Canadian company, a 3-year-old satellite technology developer called Kepler Communications, did not hand China a first for putting a foreign satellite into space. The satellite program that goes back to 1985 has deployed hardware for other countries about 30 times. They’re often for small countries such as Laos, where technology comes nowhere near that of China given its small, largely poor population.

“Foreign companies have been using Chinese space launch services for years,” says Richard Bitzinger, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “In fact, it's a very lucrative field that China has been keen to compete in.”

Now China stands to take a profitable lead in satellite launches against competitors in Russia, the United States and France, the headquarters of Arianespace. There are two reasons:

Rocket technology

China’s rocket technology has failed at launches just three times of 200 since the late 1990s following a stormier past, Bitzinger says. Development of the solid propellant rocket for satellite launches puts China on the same level as Arianespace and NASA as well as private American firms. Japan, though technologically advanced for longer than China, was still perfecting a solid propellant rocket into 2016.

Liquid propellant rockets require launch vehicles to take on the extra weight of pumps, piping and fuel storage, per this explanation.

Now China might be able to do satellite launches for less than foreign competitors, says Yun Sun, East Asia Program senior associate at the Stimson Center think tank in the United States. China has said it could launch for as little as $5000 per kilogram, a fraction of that charged by Boeing and Lockheed Martin to the US government. "India seems to be the main competitor to China in terms of the commercial satellite launch," Sun says.

As a clue to how lucrative the contract launch business can be, 38-year-old Arianespace announced revenue of 1.3 billion euros ($1.59 billion) last year.

Kepler Communications found the price, and a lot more, to be right. "The pricing was fair-market," a company representative said in an e-mail interview. "We greatly appreciate the professionalism and expertise of the (Chinese) team, as well as the safe ride to orbit. They were a great partner."

Satellite data security

China and its foreign clients have largely figured out how to make sure satellite data lands only in the hands of their owners, analysts say. The promise of data security raises the appeal of any contract satellite launch program.

Foreign satellite operators may still worry about how China treats information gathered in space, Sun says. “It’s like any infrastructure project and it depends on whether a sovereign nation is comfortable with purchasing and deploying a satellite by China,” she says.

But operators can put any information into black boxes, Bitzinger says. That recourse might be enough for satellites that do weather forecasting or land surveying. Anyone with super-sensitive data would probably not look for China at all, he says. A lot of foreign companies still worry that China will steal data for commercial or military reasons.

The Chinese satellite program shows at least one sign of avoid those breaches. China wants to start building “generic satellites” that other countries can buy and adapt for uses that would probably not relate to national security, the scholar in Singapore says.