Shortly after the Spring Festival, Lin Haifeng, Vice President of Haosheng Technology Group, prepared to travel to Hefei, Anhui Province. "Our collaborative project with the local high-frequency orbit satellite initiative is accelerating," he stated. Possessing valuable high-frequency orbit resources, Haosheng Technology Group decided to base the project in Hefei, prompting numerous trips for Lin around the holiday period.
In 2025, commercial aerospace, a niche and high-barrier sector, has become a focal point for capital investment. While this trend gained momentum, Hefei had already been cultivating this field for over three years.
Entering the commercial aerospace arena presented challenges for Hefei compared to traditional hubs like Beijing and Shanghai, as it lacked established aerospace research institutes. Three years prior, the city housed only 30 to 40 companies related to space and air information. "Hefei had almost no inherent foundation for commercial aerospace," admitted Li Qingshan, Deputy Director of the Hefei Investment Promotion Bureau.
Following the establishment of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, Hefei decided to enter the sector. A dedicated industrial chain promotion team was formed, led by city officials and spearheaded by the Investment Promotion Bureau. However, instead of pursuing the then-popular path of rocket manufacturing, Hefei chose a more measured, seemingly indirect strategy: starting from downstream applications with clear payment willingness. This approach aimed to fund research and development through application revenues and foster manufacturing capabilities via market demand.
"The focus wasn't solely on technological advancement but on viable business models—ensuring companies could sustain themselves without perpetual government support," Li Qingshan explained. "At that time, satellite launch demand wasn't sufficient to justify massive production facilities. How would such capacity be utilized?" Deep research into leading rocket companies revealed unclear commercial logic for large reusable rockets.
Remote sensing data applications emerged as an ideal starting point. Hefei targeted areas with genuine, sustained government and industry demand—land monitoring, environmental inspection, agricultural yield estimation, and emergency disaster response—which could provide stable cash flow for data service companies.
In November 2021, the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement with the Hefei municipal government. The GEOVIS Digital Earth Global Headquarters project by Zhongke Star Map landed in Hefei. "We began with downstream applications, gradually identified pain points in data acquisition and processing, and then expanded into satellite measurement, control, and eventually manufacturing," said Li Huidan, Vice President of Zhongke Star Map.
Today, Zhongke Star Map has established nine subsidiaries in Hefei. Among them, Zhongke Star Map Measurement and Control Technology Co., Ltd. was listed on the Beijing Stock Exchange on January 2, 2025, becoming the first commercial aerospace entity on that exchange.
To help companies validate their models, Hefei proactively opened city-level application scenarios. Li Huidan noted the significant support: "The government provided extensive scenario support, including urban governance, emergency management, ecological environment monitoring, and the low-altitude economy." At the low-altitude test site in Hefei's Luogang Park, Zhongke Star Map's integrated "space-air-ground" capabilities were successfully tested and verified.
This closed-loop thinking also characterized Hefei's collaboration with capital. In 2023, Jinsha Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of the Sha Steel Group, first engaged with Hefei regarding a rocket project. "At that time, commercial aerospace was still a niche industry. Few regions had Hefei's level of deep understanding," recalled Liu Shang, a partner at Jinsha Capital.
In June 2024, a 1.3 billion yuan industrial fund, jointly initiated by Jinsha Capital and Hefei Industrial Investment, among others, was formally established. It became Hefei's first market-driven fund dedicated exclusively to commercial aerospace. "In discussions, Hefei officials rarely focused solely on competing via subsidy levels. Instead, they prioritized identifying which part of the industrial chain most needed funding and which technological path was most likely to achieve a viable business model first," Liu Shang added.
In 2025, following a recommendation from Jinsha Capital, Spark Space, a company specializing in small liquid-propellant rockets, settled in Hefei's Xinzhan High-Tech District. After three years of "pulling the industry upstream from downstream," Hefei's commercial aerospace ecosystem has quietly taken shape. The number of related enterprises grew from a few dozen to 165, with industrial scale exceeding 10 billion yuan.
For 2025, Hefei proposed an even more ambitious vision: building a "giant constellation" system. "This is not merely a commercial project but a space-based information network with significant strategic value, integrating communication, navigation, and remote sensing," Li Qingshan explained. The constellation aims to consolidate resources from entities already based in Hefei—such as those from the Zhongke system, Galaxy Aerospace, and Guodian High-tech—addressing the current fragmentation and redundant construction of small, dispersed low-orbit constellations. The goal is to create a unified "space-air information network" with coordinated high, medium, and low-orbit assets.
Hefei has already made preliminary progress across all orbital tiers: Guodian High-tech's "Tianqi Constellation" Phase I recently achieved global networking, becoming China's first low-orbit satellite Internet of Things constellation. Jiucheng Satellite, under Haosheng Technology Group, a holder of valuable high-frequency orbit resources, has also located its space-based network constellation project in Hefei.
Over three years, Hefei has methodically built a comprehensive industrial ecosystem in the commercial aerospace sector, starting from genuine application demands.
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