HELSINKI — China’s southern province of Guangdong is aiming to create a fully integrated commercial aerospace ecosystem with its latest policy moves.
Guangdong is seeking to establish an ecosystem covering launch, satellite communications and applications by streamlining approval processes and ensuring resource support, while also backing early demonstration projects in cutting-edge fields such as space mining and space tourism.
China’s central government has already identified commercial space as being of key strategic value. This has led to provinces and local governments rolling out policies and action plans to fuel growth in the sector.
The latest move saw the Guangdong provincial government release its “Measures for Promoting High-Quality Development of Commercial Space (2025–2028)” document Aug. 19. The measures extend and implement an earlier 2024–2028 Action Plan on promoting the commercial space industry issued in fall 2024.
It sets out seven domains with 21 measures to support the development of commercial space. These are: satellite constellation infrastructure, ground station network development, key technology innovation, full industry-chain integration, first-application pilot scenarios, supporting ecosystem and clusters, and Implementation and incentives.
Through these, Guangdong province aims to position itself as a national hub for commercial aerospace innovation and adoption, creating favorable conditions, both regulatory and financial, for private sector growth, innovation, and industrial synergies in space-related technologies.
It follows moves by, most notably, Beijing and Shanghai, to foster commercial space ecosystems. These have already developed strong launch and satellite clusters, as well as being the major hubs for state-owned space activities.
There appeared to be no measurable goals set out by Guangdong, whereas Shanghai, for instance, laid down targets of establishing capacity for an annual output of 50 commercial rockets and 600 commercial satellites, and building a space information industry worth more than 200 billion yuan ($28.2 billion) by 2025. It did, however, note concrete terms for available financial support and tools for implementation. The Guangdong measures also have sights on future industries.
A provision on expanding the scale of the satellite application industry aims to accelerate the promotion of satellite internet services in cutting-edge fields such as the low-altitude economy, mobile communications, logistics and transportation, smart cities, space mining, space tourism and emergency rescue, and implement a number of major application scenario innovation demonstration projects.
“Support enterprises in investing in satellite constellations for civil and commercial applications; provide a ‘green channel’ service for project approval, and coordination support for satellite frequency and orbital resources,” the measures state.
Guangdong’s space policy action fits into China’s national strategies, such as a focus on satellite internet as a “new infrastructure,” and positions itself to potentially benefit from new civil space infrastructure planning.
China’s 2015–2025 civil space infrastructure plan focused on developing a remote sensing, communications and navigation backbone. A new National Civilian Space Infrastructure Medium- and Long-Term Development Plan (2026-2035) is currently being drafted and is likely to be open to, and create support for, commercial space. Guangdong also commits to up to 50 percent co-funding for projects selected as national science and technology priorities.
There are already strong space industry activities in the province. The sprawling provincial capital Guangzhou already formulated a plan to establish a space cluster in 2021, and hosts companies such as launch provider CAS Space—which recently test fired the first stage for its new Kinetica-2 rocket at facilities in the province—and Geespace, the satellite arm of automaker Geely. Meanwhile, the coastal city of Yangjiang set out plans early this year to establish the Guangdong (Yangjiang) Space Launch Center.