On Jan. 9, four days before Taiwan’s presidential election, a scary alarm blared on mobile phones around the country accompanied by a bilingual text message saying, in English, that China had fired a missile over Taiwan.

That turned out to be wrong. The Chinese part of the message was accurate, indicating that China had launched a satellite in outer space over Taiwan, but Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense had to issue an apology that same night for the mistake.

The use of the term “missile” in English was a technical error, but the incident reflected the fact that rockets are used to launch both missiles and satellites, which is why Chinese rocket launches have always been closely monitored by Taiwan’s military.

What the military detected on Jan. 9 was a Long March 2C rocket. The rocket’s predecessor carried China’s home-grown Dongfeng missiles, but this time it sent the Einstein Probe satellite into orbit.

Jointly developed by China, the European Union, and Germany, the Einstein Probe is a low-orbit satellite used to develop a better understanding of black holes and supernova explosions, according to the European Space Agency.

The nationwide alarm also unveiled for the first time in Taiwan the battle between the United States and China over low-orbit satellites.

9,000 Asteroids 2,000 km Above Ground

There are currently more than 9,000 active satellites in space, according to global satellite statistics, and they can be divided into “high-orbit,” “medium-orbit,” and “low-orbit” satellites, depending on their distance from the Earth’s surface.

At present, 90 percent of them are low-orbit satellites within 2,000 kilometers of the ground. In 2023 alone, 2,736 low-orbit satellites that are still active were launched, the most ever in a single year.

Why the sudden surge?

Mainly because of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the emergence of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a low-orbit satellite specialist, as a big winner in the hostilities.

Yet long before the Russia-Ukraine war, the space race that was seemingly brought to a halt after the Cold War had been rekindled. The only differences are that the main competition that once pitted the U.S. and the Soviet Union now matches the U.S. against China, and militaries have had to adjust their philosophies to keep up with new technologies.

In 2016, the United States Army called for “multi-domain operations” for the first time in the belief that wars of the future would not only be staged on land or sea or in the air but also in space, on the internet, and in the electromagnetic spectrum.

A year later, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched the Blackjack program, which sought to build a global satellite constellation in a short period with the help of the private sector by using commercial satellites to carry military payloads. That approach is considered beneficial to developing hypersonic missiles capable of piercing existing missile defense systems.

Space: Battleground of the Future

In the wake of those moves by the United States, China announced for the first time in 2020 that it was incorporating satellite-based internet into its basic infrastructure system, and it also aspired to develop a global low-orbit satellite constellation.

Since then, China has been quickly catching up, with its number of active low-orbit satellites catapulting to second-most in the world, behind only the United States.

“This new space race is all about low orbit,” Terry van Haren, CEO of American satellite services provider LeoLabs and former Royal Australian Air Force commander, told CommonWealth Magazine.

But the U.S. and Chinese strategies have had different starting points, leading to clear differences in the entities launching their satellites.

More than 14,000 low-orbit satellites have been launched from 1957 to the present, according to publicly available figures, with 8,522, or more than half of the total, sent into space by the United States. Of those 8,522, over half have been Starlink satellites fired into space by Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX over the past three years.

China has barely sent a tenth as many low-orbit satellites into space as the U.S., but behind nearly every one of them exists the shadow of the People’s Liberation Army or a state-run enterprise.

“The PRC’s [satellites] are not only used for scientific research but also for military and surveillance purposes,” van Haren said.

The flight of a Chinese rocket carrying a satellite into space above Taiwan just days before Taiwan’s presidential election was not an isolated event. China launched satellites at least 13 times from 2023 to the present, with six of those traversing Taiwanese airspace or flying in outer space above the island, according to flight paths provided publicly by Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense.

U.S. Military Getting Nervous

The rapid development of China’s official launchers or SpaceX’s Starlink should have Taiwan paying close attention.

First China. It has aggressively developed drones in recent years, and low-orbit satellites play a critical role in the coordinated communications and systems connections that support drone operations.

Its ambition to develop hypersonic missiles is also a threat. A document recently leaked out of the U.S. Department of Defense warned that the U.S. was lagging behind China in developing such missiles and related interception systems.

“China wants to build Starlink too,” said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell bluntly in May 2023. “One thing China doesn’t have – they don’t have reusable rockets. I believe they will get there pretty quickly.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has stepped up its gray zone tactics against Taiwan, and in military simulations conducted by the U.S., Japan, or Taiwan, a cutoff of Taiwan’s communications is one of the possible scenarios being tested.

The director-general of the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA), Wu Jong-shinn (吳宗信), has estimated that it would require at least 120 Starlink level satellites weighing 200 to 300 kilograms each to ensure that Taiwan’s communications are not interrupted, which is more than had been imagined.

But can Taiwan truly rely on SpaceX, the biggest company in its field, to achieve such a goal?

Taiwan Choosing OneWeb over Starlink

In an updated version of his biography on Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson wrote that as Ukraine prepared to attack the Russian fleet in Crimea, it thought Starlink coverage for Ukraine was enabled all the way to the peninsula, but it was not. When Ukraine asked Musk to activate Starlink to support the drone attack, he refused, thinking it would cause a major war.

On another occasion, in an interview with the Financial Times in October 2022, Musk commented on Taiwan-China relations and said, “my recommendation… would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable.”

Neither of those developments could have inspired Taiwan to have confidence in the Starlink network, but Evin Liao (廖榮皇), the director of the Industrial Technology Research Institute’s Commercialization and Industry Service Center, said there is an alternative.

“Currently, the only low-orbit satellites with global coverage are Starlink and OneWeb, a joint venture between Britain and Bharti Enterprises of India,” Liao said.

Indeed, Musk’s positions may explain why Taiwan ultimately chose to work with low-orbit satellite services provider OneWeb, even though it deploys fewer satellites than the dominant Starlink.

This year, OneWeb’s signals are expected to cover all of Taiwan. Chunghwa Telecom, which represents OneWeb in Taiwan, plans to build base stations that can receive OneWeb signals, one of the starting points for Taiwan to enter the new space race.

Even with the existence of global low-orbit satellite services providers, however, Taiwan’s government and private sector are planning to jointly launch home-grown satellites.

In the first half of November 2023, two “pearls” from Taiwan cut through the sky of southern California.

The low-orbit satellites, the “Pearl-1H” and “Pearl-1C,” developed and manufactured jointly by Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Foxconn) and National Central University, were the size of a backpack and weighed less than 10 kilos apiece.

The low-orbit satellite. (Source: Foxconn)

As the opening salvo of Taiwan’s deployment in space, they circle the Earth every 96 minutes while exploring space and conducting communications experiments.

With those satellites now in orbit, the TASA expects to launch its first Taiwan-made “Starlink” low-orbit satellite, called the B5G, by 2026, and then two more by 2028.

The new battle in space is unfolding across a vast universe, representing an important strategic development. It is one that Taiwan is determined to be a part of.

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Translated by Luke Sabatier
Uploaded by Ian Huang