Welcome to Taikonautica, your weekly dose of the Chinese space industry. If you haven’t subscribed yet, sign up here.
And if you like what you’ve been reading, please forward to your friends!
This week: PIESAT raises money for a new constellation, a new space journal is born, and two chipmakers fight it out in court.
News Roundup
August 21: PIESAT announced their intention to issue A shares of not more than 700 million RMB. Not more than 240 million RMB of that amount is to pay the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) or another third party to build and launch a four-satellite remote sensing constellation which will use synthetic-aperture radar. If I am reading this correctly, this is a bit of a departure for PIESAT, which is a satellite service provider and, as far as I understand, has previously focused on software and does not own any satellites.
August 21: There was some movement in an ongoing legal battle between the satellite navigation chip makers Techtotop and u-blox (link in Chinese). The National Intellectual Property Administration recently held a hearing on whether or not a patent held by the Swiss company u-blox should be invalidated and that therefore the Chinese company Techtotop (whose Chinese name translates to Taidou Microelectronics Technology Co., Ltd) should be allowed to use the technology.
This issue started when:
On March 22, 2019, u-blox filed a patent infringement lawsuit and software copyright infringement lawsuit against Techtotop in the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court, claiming that Techtotop publicly copied u-blox's GNSS firmware
Techtotop then countersued by filing a request for invalidation of the u-blox patent with the State Intellectual Property Office and also filed its own patent infringement lawsuit and copyright infringement lawsuit against u-blox in the Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court and the Guangzhou Huangpu District People’s Court based on a separate patent.
August 26: Wang Xiaojun, the head of the first academy of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) visited the East Spaceport in Haiyang, Shandong Province (link in Chinese). The spaceport is under construction, having been announced last year, and is to focus on sea launches.
Source: Spaceflight Fans
August 28: In a rare moment of China — US cooperation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science together with the the Beijing Institute of Technology launched a joint journal called Space: Science & Technology.
August 31: The People’s Daily announced that the next satellite of the People’s Nebula project will be launched in mid-October. People’s Nebula is a joint project of ABDAS (Zhongke Guangqi Space Information Technology Co., Ltd.) and People Data (owned by the People’s Daily).
Until next time
My name is Cory Fitz and I write the Taikonautica newsletter. To make you smarter about China’s rapidly evolving space industry, Taikonautica brings you translations of Chinese-language articles, as well as a roundup of links and news.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me on Twitter at @cory_fitz