Meizu satellite successfully launched into the sky! Geely lays out the "car, hand, star" ecology

On September 6, Meizu announced the successful launch of its Lucky Star satellite, and said that it would fully support Meizu's innovative applications in many fields such as smart electric vehicles, smart phones, and XR technology, and provide wide coverage/highly reliable communication solutions for Meizu's product matrix.

After Meizu Technology was acquired by Geely's Xingji Times, it established Xingji Meizu Group in Wuhan and began to vigorously integrate into Geely's ecosystem. In fact, the Meizu Lucky Star satellite is also built by Geely Group's commercial aerospace company Shikong Daoyu, which can cooperate with smartphones and electric vehicles to achieve satellite communication in Geely's future travel constellation in the future.

It can be called the fastest commercial satellite constellation project in China

The "Lucky Star" satellite jointly created by Xingji Meizu and Shikong Daoyu is actually a part of Geely's future travel constellation. The launch was in the form of 10 satellites with one arrow, including the "Lucky Star", a total of 10 satellites, and operated in the third orbital plane of Geely's future constellation.

Since the launch of the Geely Future Planetary Constellation in 2019, Spacetime Daoyu has experienced 3 constellation satellite launches, including the launch of 9 satellites in the first orbit plane in June 2022; In February 2024, 11 satellites from the second orbital plane will be launched; By September 6, 10 satellites will be launched on the third orbital plane.

After the successful launch, Daoyu said that through a total of 30 satellites in three orbital planes, it can achieve 24-hour global regional coverage of 90%, and officially began to provide satellite communication services for overseas users. This is also the first time that a Chinese commercial aerospace company has provided low-orbit satellite communication services to global users.

According to the plan, Geely's future travel constellation construction plan is divided into three phases, the first phase deploys 72 satellites, with the goal of realizing global real-time data communication, providing low- and medium-speed satellite communication services for global users, and supporting 200 million+ users around the world. Then, after three launches, the first phase of the satellite deployment plan has now achieved 50%.

In the second phase, 264 mobile phones are planned to be directly connected to satellites, supporting the existing stock of mobile phones directly connected to satellite communications and providing global business services. In the 5G R17 standard, which was officially frozen in June 2022, "non-terrestrial network (NTN)" (that is, the function of direct communication between mobile phones and satellites) was officially defined, that is, mobile phones that support the 5G R17 standard in the future can achieve satellite communication, but it still only supports narrowband communication such as sending SMS through satellites, or some IoT devices in remote areas can be networked, including smartphones, IoT devices that support eMTC and NB-IoT, etc., can achieve low-speed satellite communication.

The third phase plans 5,676 communication satellites to provide global commercial low-orbit broadband communication services, presumably mobile phone satellite communication can achieve the same experience as terrestrial cellular networks.

At present, from a global perspective, the largest scale of commercial satellite constellation construction is Space X's Starlink, with more than 40,000 planned satellites, according to statistics in August this year, Starlink has 6,350 satellites in orbit, of which 6,290 satellites have been put into work. The second is the United Kingdom's OneWeb constellation, which has the world's second-largest satellite constellation, with more than 600 satellites actually in orbit.

Geely clearly started late, although the project was launched in 2019, the first satellites were launched in 2022, and the pace of launches officially began in 2024. However, compared with other commercial satellite constellation projects in China, Geely's future travel constellation is already the fastest progressing project.

Geely creates a "car-hand-star" ecosystem

As early as 2021, Geely integrated the capabilities of automobile manufacturing and aerospace satellite manufacturing, established the Taizhou Star Zhilian Satellite Super Factory, and completed the launch of the first trial production satellite of Spacetime Daoyu. Li Shufu said at the time that the automobile industry is cross-border integration, with the communication between cars and satellites, the linkage between cars and ground supporting infrastructure, and the human-computer interaction between cars and people.

This is also the main reason why Geely later entered the high-end mobile phone market and acquired Meizu Technology. In the previous establishment of the Star Age Era, when entering the mobile phone market, Li Shufu also said: In the future, it has become a major trend to build a cross-border user ecological chain and build a corporate moat in accordance with the law.

As a result, the business map of Geely Technology Group, which is composed of space-time Daoyu satellite constellation, Geely Automobile, and Meizu mobile phone, has begun.

From the perspective of the composition of the industrial chain, data from SIA (United States Satellite Industry Association) shows that in 2021 alone, the value of the global satellite industry has reached 279 billion US dollars, of which the highest proportion is the ground equipment part (mainly satellite navigation systems, satellite TV antennas, small-caliber terminals, etc.), accounting for 50.9% of the industry; followed by satellite services (satellite TV, data/voice services, remote sensing), accounting for 42.3% of the satellite industry, reaching US$118 billion; Satellite manufacturing and launch revenues accounted for only $13.7 billion and $5.7 billion, respectively.

With the freezing of 5G R17, the current smart phones will also be able to use 5G NTN satellite communication in the future, and this part of the huge number of devices will be the future potential use of the communication satellite constellation.

Previously, at the Meizu 20 press conference, Meizu 20infinity had announced that it would support satellite communication and be equipped with the Meizu Tianwen S1 multi-mode satellite communication chip jointly developed by Meizu and Shikong Daoyu, but finally cut the configuration on the mass production version.

With the gradual advancement of Geely's future travel constellation, as well as the successful launch of the "Lucky Star" satellite jointly created by Geely's Xingji Meizu and its cooperation, Meizu will inevitably integrate satellite communication functions into smartphones to access the satellite communication ecosystem.

At the same time, in automobiles, Geely has already launched mass production passenger cars that support satellite communication, including ZEEKR 001, ZEEKR 007, ZEEKR 009, Geely Galaxy E8 and other models, all of which have achieved front-end mass production of satellite communication. In addition to communication, another important significance of low-orbit satellite constellation for automobiles is positioning, and the satellite-based high-precision positioning (PPP-RTK) technology of Spacetime Daoyu has also launched terminal equipment.

In September last year, the vehicle-grade high-precision fusion positioning terminal independently developed by Spacetime Daoyu - Ripple Zhixing was officially released, and the product will be the first to be mass-produced and applied to the intelligent rear-drive coupe SUV Ruilan 7. Through the positioning terminal and communication satellite services, the vehicle can obtain real-time high-frequency, high-precision, high-reliability vehicle positioning, attitude, speed and other sensor data information, and realize accurate lane-level navigation, automatic parking and other services in complex urban environments such as elevated interchanges, urban canyons, and tree shade blocking. The positioning accuracy is higher than 10cm in the typical line of autonomous driving; In tunnels where satellite signals cannot be received, the positioning error with inertial navigation technology is within 1/1000.

In June this year, the space-time Daoyu star-based high-precision positioning project passed the Germany Rheinland TÜV ASPICE L2 certification assessment, completing the last piece of the puzzle of vehicle-grade certification, which also means that the star-based high-precision positioning service can begin to be promoted to more models.

As a communication satellite constellation, after achieving global coverage, Spacetime Daoyu has also begun to actively deploy global services, and has carried out the landing of multi-field satellite communication solutions in Malaysia, the Middle East and other places, such as smart ports, smart agriculture, etc.

Write at the end

With mobile phone terminal companies such as Huawei and Apple, as well as aerospace technology companies such as SpaceX bringing satellite communication to the consumer market, satellite communication has begun to become an important route for smart terminals to access the Internet in the future. As the most advanced commercial aerospace company in China, Spacetime Daoyu has been at the forefront of constellation construction. However, there are still a number of constellation plans in China, including the planning of more than 10,000 satellites of the "star network", etc., which have begun to speed up the progress this year, and plan to launch for the first time at the Hainan commercial space launch site at the end of the year, and it is expected that the construction of domestic satellite constellations will usher in an explosive period next year.