Commercial Space Can Forestall China's Space Dominance: Astranis CEO

If not for SpaceX's Starlink launches, U.S. launch cadence would be about half of what China is doing, said Astranis CEO John Gedmark in a Twitter thread last week. Since 2018, China's military space program's ramp-up has reached a launch a week, he said. "That is a crazy number of things being launched into space" and includes earth observation and communications satellites, modules for China's space station, its BeiDou global navigation satellite system and large numbers of classified satellite missions, he said. Gedmark said the U.S.' commercial space sector is a means of ensuring China doesn't dominate space, and the Space Force and NASA need to support those commercial operators.