China gears up to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink this year

BEIJING: China’s military-industrial complex is set to start building its first constellation of very low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites later this year, the latest Chinese bid to catch up with U.S.-based Starlink.

Starlink, operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s Space X, has built a fast-growing network of more than 3,500 satellites in low-Earth orbit. It has tens of thousands of users in the United States so far, and plans to add tens of thousands more satellites to its system, the largest of its kind.