08 October 2020
Despite being affected by three typhoons and the COVID-19 epidemic, Song Jilin's 20 hectares of rice on the Qixing farm, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, embraced a bumper harvest this year. There was a lack of hands during the spring plowing season because of the epidemic, but the unmanned rice transplanters equipped with China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) helped out, Song said. On the Qixing farm, a combine harvester guided by the BDS is shuttling between the rice fields. Zhang Jinghui, another major rice planter, said with advanced navigation technology, the harvester can work precisely with an error range of less than 2 cm. It can also work during the night to increase efficiency.
MORE...
08 October 2020
In a room resembling a space capsule filled with blue light, tens of thousands of Petri dishes, nurturing clusters of white enoki mushrooms, were placed on shelves. This is an edible fungus breeding room in Weining Xuerong Biotechnology Co., Ltd, one of the largest targeted poverty alleviation projects in China's southwestern mountainous province of Guizhou. The factory has 320 such breeding rooms, with about 56,000 bottles of edible fungi growing in each room. Growing edible fungi not only increases income for local farmers but also offers another possible food choice for human beings to survive in space.
MORE...
06 October 2020
China (International) Commercial Aerospace Forum (CCAF) is the first professional forum in the field of commercial aerospace in China. Started in 2015, the forum has been held for five consecutive years. Developing along with the commercial aerospace industry of China, the forum has become a serial, industrial and authoritative brand, providing a high-end platform for exchange and cooperation between the government, enterprises, academia, capital and other related fields. CCAF has effectively gathered advanced enterprises and collaborative resources of the international commercial aerospace industry and played a significant role in supporting the overall development and ecological construction of the commercial aerospace industry all over the world. The 6th CCAF will be held on 19-20 October 2020 - both online and offline.
MORE...
06 October 2020
Welcome to Episode 4 of the Dongfang Hour. This week, we invite our very first guest to the podcast to discuss satellite constellations. We speak with Tianyi about communications constellations. This year has seen a significant acceleration in the rollout of western low earth orbit (LEO) communications constellations, with the most obvious example being Starlink. Less publicly, Chinese constellation projects have been making steady progress throughout the year, and while we are unlikely to see any Chinese constellation with hundreds of satellites in orbit by year-end, there is much to discuss about these projects.
MORE...
06 October 2020
Leonard David found out about the details of the upcoming space station construction. On his website "INSIDE OUTER SPACE", he is explaining what to expect in the next months. For the launch of the modules, four crews, each consisting of three taikonauts, were assigned to the CSS assembly flights. “We have comprehensively considered many factors including the astronauts’ flight experience, current situation, their ages and psychological compatibility, and subsequent development,” Huang Weifen, Chief Designer at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center, told CCTV.
MORE...
05 October 2020
SpaceWatchGlobal is reporting that China is pushing ahead with developing a giant Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation competing with SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb. SpaceWatchGlobal is quoting the Washington DC-based analyst Bhavya Lal and California State University’s Professor Larry Press. Press, professor of information systems at the California State University, mentioned a recent Chinese spectrum filing in a blog of the CircleID website. China “has filed a spectrum application with the International Telecommunication Union for two constellations with the cryptic names GW-A59 and GW-2” for a total of 12,992 satellites, Press said. “We heard about an announcement of a constellation with nearly 13,000 satellites,” Bhavya Lal confirmed.
MORE...