This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel. Behind the Black. Bob Zimmerman is here. We're going

exploring in low Earth orbit, and then we're going off to outer space. Right now, China's making a move,

always derivative. Bob, a good evening to you. China started an operation not unlike Starlink.

Is that correct?

Good evening to you.

That is correct.

China has several different proposed mega constellations of communications, low orbit,

Starlink copycat projects in line.

And this past weekend, they made the first launch on a plan to make a constellation

called Gua Wang.

I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that.

And that's going to have 13,000 satellites once launched, which would make it twice as big

as what Staling is right now,

but comparable to Staling. So they launched their first set, and what makes this launch interesting

is several things about China. First, as always, the launch was on a coastal site, so they

weren't going to dump any stages on their own people's heads. But they were using the Long March 5B rocket.

Now, your listeners might remember in the past when that Long March 5B launched, the core

stage, it has a core stage and two strap-arm boosters, the core stage would reach orbit,

release the satellite, and then it'd be in an unstable orbit.

It couldn't restart its engine, so this core stage, which was big, could come down uncontrolled

and could conceivably hit habitable areas.

In fact, in one of those cases, they did this about six times, one of those cases, if it'd

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