Several think tanks that track space debris have issued a warning about a worrying trend in China’s construction of mega-constellations of satellites for the global internet. The Celestial Empire is building two independent systems, Guowang and Qianfan. Each will consist of more than 10,000 satellites, which will require thousands of launches in the coming years.
The first launches took place at the end of 2024. Experts are concerned not about the satellites themselves, which, apparently, have a function of deorbiting after their resource is exhausted, but about the upper stages of the rockets that launch them.
Over the next few years, China will conduct more than a thousand launches. Calculations show that in the near future, the bulk of low-orbit space debris will consist of upper stages of Chinese rockets. Unless they change their approach to launches. To launch both groups, they use carriers whose upper stages end up in orbit, where they can remain for more than a hundred years.
According to monitoring data, the upper stages of the Long March rockets of modifications 6A and 8 remain in orbit at an altitude of 720 to 780 kilometers. At the same time, it is recommended that they be at an altitude of no more than 600 kilometers – this would allow them to gradually leave orbit over 25 years due to residual air resistance in the upper layers of the atmosphere.
In the long term, thousands of Long March upper stages could make it difficult for everyone to reach low Earth orbit. A solution could be to use carriers whose upper stages can restart their engines to slow down and lower their orbit. This is what SpaceX does when launching Starlink satellites with Falcon 9 rockets. China also has similar carriers, such as the Long March 5B.
Earlier we reported that a Chinese company is developing Bluetooth satellites.