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According to a report by People’s Daily Online, a manufacturing facility described as a satellite “super factory” has entered trial production in China. The plant is designed to build satellites in large numbers with a high degree of automation, moving away from the labor-intensive, one-off production that has long been the norm.
The factory is part of China’s push into commercial spaceflight, which is built around rapidly deploying large satellite constellations in low Earth orbit. The backdrop is the planned mega-constellations such as the GW network of the state-owned China Satellite Network Group (China SatNet) and the Qianfan constellation of private operator Yuanxin – projects that require hundreds, if not thousands, of satellites off an assembly line, a scale that conventional manufacturing methods would struggle to support.
With the start of trial production, the facility is expected to progressively test and ramp up its production processes and quality assurance before moving to large-scale serial manufacturing. The report did not give specific figures for planned annual capacity or the timeline for full serial production. According to the media report, the facility is viewed as a key building block enabling the planned constellations to be supplied on schedule.
The step is another sign of how strongly China is expanding industrial-scale manufacturing of space technology, from launch infrastructure such as the Hainan commercial spaceport to ground-side production plants. The classic status quo, in which every satellite is a one-of-a-kind item, is giving way to a mass-production logic.