Page 2 of
3 China draws Africa into its
orbit By Bright B Simons, Evans
Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe
weapons-of-mass-destruction efforts
by supplying precision equipment, and is said to
be subject to a probe by the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
Geopolitics is thus one
reason China cannot hope to profit as quickly as
it would want to from America's misfortunes. The
other issue, as is the case in many other areas,
is to do with national competence in other
segments allied to the hard
manufacturing
and
launching of satellites: for instance, financing,
legal, and assorted project risk management. The
British insurance industry, for example, according
to Ryan Zelnio, dominates the global satellite
underwriting business.
That is why big,
complex, multi-sector contracts like Nigcomsat-1
are just the sort of projects Chinese aerospace
contractors will kill for. To get them, however,
China will have to take on Russia, which means the
cost of engaging in regions where military
considerations are high on the space agenda can be
very high, since Russia is formidable when it
comes to space-military integration. Competition
with Russia for Iranian contracts, to cite an
example, will always prove tough.
Egypt
and Saudi Arabia, key rivals of Iran, have also
been slow in moving into the Chinese space orbit.
The two countries have commissioned a number of
mini-satellites from Italy that they intend to
launch from Ukrainian sites. Israeli intelligence
officers believe that Egypt's Egyptsat-1
satellite, whose launch into orbit has been dogged
by delays but is expected to happen early next
year, is a spy satellite. It was built by
Ukraine's Yuzhnoe Design Bureau and will launch
from the Baikonur cosmodrome, a facility Russia
rents from Kazakhstan.
China will continue
to play second fiddle to Russia only as long as it
has to compete for projects with complex political
and military motivations. Russian firms, such as
Energomash, have in the past been successful in
securing Iranian contracts only after agreeing to
extensive technology transfers, and presumably
China must have agreed to do the same in recent
commercial agreements to send Iranian payloads
into space.
However, as the Chinese
government's white paper "China's Space Activities
in 2006" reveals, China is aiming for "world-class
large space corporations to provide a market-based
mechanism of development".
Diversification
away from politically driven enterprises toward
broader commercial activities is therefore more in
synch with China's professed vision. This is
clearly the inspiration underlying the current
phase of the country's development in the space
field. In fact, since 1985, when it entered the
global commercial satellite launch market, the
broad principle that has guided the country has
been to allow a relatively independent, strictly
market-oriented aerospace sector to develop to
parallel and perhaps subsidize more military and
ideologically propelled space segments.
This accounts for the reason that, despite
the heavy rhetorical emphasis on military
applications by some Communist Party officials,
71% of all the satellites developed and launched
by China have been telecommunication platforms or
remote-sensing systems, many of which have limited
defense applicability.
It is true that all
space-exploration programs have so far been solely
financed by Beijing, but even here efforts are
accelerating to determine where commercial
crossovers can allow private sector participation.
Increasingly, universities, particularly elite
ones like Tsinghua, are playing a crucial role in
the research and development efforts underpinning
ongoing progress. And that progress has been
considerable. China has constructed many, many
terrestrial hubs, of various sizes, to relay
signals from its telecommunication satellites. The
result is a spectrum of more than 27,000
international telephone channels providing
coverage of at least 180 countries, meaning nearly
every nation in the world.
The industrial
complex at the base of this growth continues to
expand at a remarkable pace. One company, China
Jiangnan Space Industry Corp, a subsidiary of
China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASIC),
which produces GPS devices and missiles among
other advanced high-tech products, alone employs
30,000 personnel.
James Oberg, an
independent aerospace operations consultant, in
testimony to a US congressional subcommittee,
debunked some widely held opinions about China's
space program, notably the perception that recent
Chinese space platforms are merely carbon copies
of Russian and US ones. He nevertheless conceded
that a significant proportion of China's technical
output in this area comprises exact duplicates of
foreign designs.
This can be put into some
sort of perspective by recalling that the US, for
instance, spends as much as 15 times what China
does. But the experiences of such countries as
Israel and even India, which runs the world's
largest constellation of remote-sensing
satellites, using even fewer resources to achieve
impressive gains, make a strong case for China to
persist in the current path of intensifying pure
market-based commercialization.
China has
become known for price effectiveness, and this is
something it can leverage in the cost-conscious
developing world. India sees itself as possessing
the same advantage and is progressing quite
steadily toward the capacity to launch satellite
payloads above 3 tons, bringing it closer to the
scale of modern telecom satellites. So Chinese
cost effectiveness must be coupled to economies of
scale, and thus to positive cost-quality ratios to
remain a relative advantage. This may have
something to do with Xinhua's announcement last
month that China plans soon to unveil a new
satellite-launching center, the country's fourth,
at Wenchang in its southernmost island province of
Hainan. Because of its low-latitude location, the
new center will offer very high-energy payload
efficiency, helping to keep costs low for clients.
Meanwhile, extensive upgrades are being
made to existing launching sites such as Xichang
to ensure continuing commercial competitiveness.
Since wide-ranging modernization in 1993, Xichang
has been at the center of China's space
commercialization drive. Nigeria's Nigcomsat-1
satellite will be launched by a Long March 3B
carrier rocket from Xichang.
The Africa
factor Nigeria's approach provides one
window for looking at the unfolding situation in
Africa. Here, what is evident is a classic switch
from the West to China in search of putative
national goals. Nigeria has had a space
cooperation framework of a tentative sort with the
US going as far back as 1958, when the Joint
Propulsion Laboratory (which the Chinese visionary
Hsue-Shen Tsien help found) brought mobile radio
tracking stations into
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
