Chinese Companies to Build Commercial Spaceport on the Horn of Africa
The Hong Kong Aerospace Technology Group (HKATG) and a Shanghai-based Touchroad International Holdings Group have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the government of Djibouti to build a $1 billion commercial spaceport with seven launch pads and three rocket engine test facilities.
Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh met with company officials on Monday to discuss the planned Djiboutian Spaceport, which will be constructed in the northern Obock region near the entrance to the Red Sea. It would be the first orbital spaceport in Africa.
HKATG’s core business is building designing and manufacturing satellites. The company has performed satellite engineering for the Golden Bauhinia and Aurora satellite constellations. The group owns five technical and manufacturing centers.
Touchroad International has been “conducting businesses in Africa for over 20 years with exposures in various industries and projects including the development and construction of special economic zones in the Republic of Djibouti, mineral extraction, international trade, and cultural exchange and tourism,” according to a business update from HKATG.
“The Djiboutian Government will provide the necessary land (minimum 10 square kilometres and with a term of not less than 35 years) and all the necessary assistance to build and operate the Djiboutian Spaceport,” the update said.
HKATG and the Djiboutian government will manage the spaceport for a period of 30 years. The government will then take control over the facility.
Construction of the spaceport is expected to begin after the parties sign a formal agreement in March. The project is expected to take five years.
The Djiboutian government said the project will require the development of a port facility, a network of highways, and a power grid.
38 responses to “Chinese Companies to Build Commercial Spaceport on the Horn of Africa”
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I HAVE WAITED DECADES TO TYPE
shake ya boote.
Africa offers excellent launch geography both for equatorial launch as well as polar. Where’s old Cecil when you need him?
Nervy, flying right over the Somali pirate territory.
Or shipping rockets through it…
The Chinese government is not like the United States government. If the pirates steal a Chinese rocket they will just be wiped out.
If they can correctly identify the guilty parties. Some of the tribalism in that region would seem to have gangs leaving the evidence on their rivals property if that was the expectation.
Likely China will just take both out if they are confused and the blowback from the innocent can be contained.
Assuming other parties capable of forcefully objecting stand aside to allow such, yes, that would be the normative expectation.
Maybe. If they have the ‘blue water’ reach for it.
China has been contributing to the anti-pirate patrols for nearly two decades. But big power conflicts, not cooperation, makes news.
Yes. Being the nation-state most singularly dependent on Persian Gulf oil, the PRC certainly hasn’t lacked for incentives to make nice with foreign navies – even ours – on anti-piracy patrols.
They do.
They do if unopposed. If anyone along the way with a real blue water navy – ourselves, Japan or India, say – objects, however, it’s pretty much Game Over for the PLAN.
Hope it stays that way. Closer to home the Chinese have some real reach and capabilities.
They really don’t. The PLAN numbers a lot of hulls, but most are fairly small with limited “legs.” The PLAN is pretty much a glorified Coast Guard with a few larger combatants as showpieces. It has no real capability to deploy, sustain and defend a decent-sized force at sea for any great length of time.
A lot of people who run ships for real don’t agree with your assessment. You could invoke the American overestimation of Soviet hardware and I’d agree that that’s probably happening now with China, but do remember while even Ukraine could stop Soviet hardware with their Soviet hardware, they did so with great casualties. I think what a lot of the people who shake in their boots over China fear are the casualties the US Navy will have to take to stop a Chinese attempt on Taiwan. I think they also fear that like Putin, Xi may be un-deterrable.
If the people who disagree are active duty Navy I can certainly appreciate their fidelity to the approved narrative when talking to outsiders.
The fact remains that the PLAN, while it has a lot of ships, many of which are fairly new, most are smaller and less capable than their American counterparts. The PRC has dozens of destroyers, for example, but only eight are bigger than USN Arleigh Burkes. The PRC has dozens of diesel-electric subs too, but only a half-dozen nuke attack boats and a half-dozen nuke boomers. The PRC’s two operational aircraft carriers are Kuznetsov-class ships, one of actual Russian manufacture and the other an improved PRC-built version. The new Fujian carrier will be fitting out and undergoing sea trials for years. It wouldn’t be a factor in any reasonably near-term attack on Taiwan.
Given large USN superiority in large capital ships – and the PLAN’s lack of combat experience, I see no reason to suppose the U.S. would suffer heavy losses in any notional defense of Taiwan.
Given that Xi recently demoted and banished his most aggressive wolf-warrior diplomat, I think he’s quite deterrable.
I’m going to give the PLAN a bit more credence than you will. But I hope you’re right. I think you have been proven right in the past 6 months. I think there was a planned invasion for the October time frame. Ukraine, I think, made them hesitate. The loss of Moskva gave China something to think hard about, not to mention a preview of coming attractions for making amphib landings.
The PLAN doesn’t have much of a blue water reach, but it has enough to handle potential Somali piracy in cheap and violent ways. Of course if the PRC is foolish enough to try taking Taiwan before it goes under, there may well be no blue water PLAN left afterward. That would be one more strike against the likelihood of any post-PRC Chinese nation-state electing to continue such a project in distant Africa.
There seems to be a failure of imagination still prevalent in siting launch complexes. Latitude matters a lot when rockets are rare and expensive, and they’ll matter a lot again when rockets are so ridiculously cheap and common that fuel costs will make a difference to profitability, but we’re in a middle period now where that’s not the case.
Between those eras, latitude is much less important than being close to your industrial base: You want minimum feedback times, minimum recurring transport times and costs, minimum logistical headaches. The value of that dwarfs whatever savings you get from the low-latitude energy boost.
Interesting observations. Favorable predictable local weather conditions will also loom larger when launch frequency gets ever higher.
The desire for coastal launch sites, in the interest of launch safety, could be considered another example of obsolete tradition.
SpaceX and Rocket Lab both agree, that return-to-launch-site flyback for reuse of 1st stages is the best path.
Or if there is enough land downrange for a landing pad. Distance of the SpaceX barges for performance, but returns same day on a flatbed truck.
In general, road/rail mobile rockets are limited to a maximum size of about 12 feet diameter (the same diameter as the Falcon 9). Anything larger either has to get broken down into components, like the Russian Proton, or has to travel by sea, like the Chinese Long March 5.
That’s part of why return-to-launch-site is such a desirable feature. Increasing the speed of launch frequency is also not to be overlooked, since there is no transit time wasted for return of the booster to the launch site.
RTLS is certainly desirable. Whether it’s best depends on available performance for a particular payload and options for return. If there’s a 12 foot limit and your stage is 15 feet, then RTLS is basically compulsory. If there’s a straight rural highway or railroad that allows the size you happen to be flying, perhaps not. A few compelling details making the determination.
It has occurred to me a few times that the Chinese and Russian inland launches with stages crashing on land should have been the leaders on booster recovery and reuse.
Yeah, with the preexisting inland launch infrastructure of Russia and China, you’d think they’d be terribly eager for having their own equivalent of a Falcon 9!
Another interesting blindspot of all the space powers, is air-transportation of empty rocket stages. We’ve seen some limited use of air transport in the past with things like Super Guppies carrying S-IVB and Shuttle Orbiters carried piggyback on a 747. The technical problem of course is size instead of weight. Even the giant core stage of the SLS only masses about 84 metric tons.
Air transportation of rocket stages seems like an ideal role for something like a modern airship?
i love the Roc, but it was designed more for carrying a very heavy weight underwing rather than a very large diameter payload.
In theory the Roc should be able to carry aloft the weight of an empty SLS core-stage. But the size of an 8.6 meter diameter SLS core-stage is still a problem.
IIRC, the idea behind Stratolaunch was airlaunch of a Falcon 5 sized rocket. As such, it needed to carry a very heavy weight to a very high altitude, but not a rocket of very large diameter. Falcon 9 is only 12 feet in diameter.
I don’t know if there is even enough clearance beneath the wing to even carry a medium sized stage, such as Vulcan which is 5.4 meters in diameter. It might be possible to redesign the Roc so it can carry an overwing payload? But I’m highly doubtful. Maybe carry piggyback over one of the fuselages? That has obvious issues too.
Staying true to your nature, Gary? Why did I even bother replying?
https://aviationweek.com/al…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Folks shouldn’t forget that the two C-133s that are rotting away at Mojave were specifically designed to carry the Thor and similar rockets to foreign launch sites.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Original thinking has never been much of a feature of “workers’ paradises.”
Indeed. There’s no reason that rockets wouldn’t become ultimately far more reliable than aircraft, so eventually the coastal requirement will be obsolete. And there should be some forward-thinking papers on that, to define exactly when industry should push hard for some regulatory reform to reflect the new level of safety.
This project, though, is planned to have an indefinite future life. So it’s hardly out of line to site a new launch complex somewhere where massive deliveries of propellant can be made by sea on a regular basis. SpaceX is planning to launch much of its future Starship traffic from platforms at sea, for example, not from inland sites.
curious if this happens
Yes. The near-term disintegration of the PRC nation-state would certainly put a potential kink in that hose, for example. Still, a post-PRC confederation of coastal Chinese cities would likely include Hong Kong and there’s also the Singaporean involvement in this spaceport project. So it might manage to ride out the collapse of the PRC and see completion anyway.
But that is hardly a cinch bet. Especially as Hainan, where Wenchang is located, would almost certainly be a part of any notional Chinese coastal city-state confederation. I suspect such a confederation might find going all the way to Djibouti for launches more of a reach than it deems prudent.
Along those lines it appears that the population of China actually decreased last year according to a Reuters article. It should be noted that China’s working age population peaked a few years ago, around 2014/2015. Projections are for China to have half as many people at the end of the Century than it has now.
And do those projections include the age distribution of the population at the end of the Century compared to now?
Nearly all of China’s much-diminished population will be elderly at century’s end. Like Russia is rapidly becoming, most of China will be another collection of hospice nations rapidly dwindling toward extinction.
It’s actually worse than that. Peter Zeihan reports that revisions to the 2020 census released last year indicate a population overcount of more the 100 million, all of whom would have been notionally born after the One Child Policy was imposed. Individual provinces are tasked with counting their own residents and, as these counts determine a lot of the funding provinces get from the central government, there is a strong built-in incentive to pad the figures.
Among the upshots of all of this are that the PRC may have as few as 1.25 billion citizens at present, not 1.4 billion, and that India, which does have 1.4 billion citizens, probably passed the PRC in total population 15 or more years ago.
There’s also the little matter that the made-up Chinese would all still be of child-bearing age and disproportionately female. The PRC population has probably been shrinking for some time. This is merely the first year the government is willing to admit the fact. The grotesque overcount of still-fertile women in the PRC means that the Chinese population will most likely decline so fast from here on out that it will halve by mid-century and decline much further than that by century’s end.
The PRC will be gone long before either of these milestones, of course, but the entire Han ethnicity is in serious danger of following it into oblivion not too much later.