“Xi’s goal was that if China has to become a critical player in technology, including in civil space and aerospace, it was critical to develop a space ecosystem that includes the private sector,” says Namrata Goswami, a geopolitics expert based in Montgomery, Alabama, who’s been studying China’s space program for many years. “He was taking a cue from the American private sector to encourage innovation from a talent pool that extended beyond state-funded organizations.”
As a result, there are now 78 commercial space companies operating in China, according to a2019 report by the Institute for Defense Analysis. More than half have been founded since 2014, and the vast majority focus on satellite manufacturing and launch services.
For example, Galactic Energy, founded in February 2018, is building its Ceres rocket to offer rapid launch service for single payloads, while its Pallas rocket is being built to deploy entire constellations. Rival company i-Space, formed in 2016, became the first commercial Chinese company to make it to space with its Hyperbola-1 in July 2019. It wants to pursue reusable first-stage boosters that can land vertically, like those from SpaceX. So does LinkSpace (founded in 2014), although it also hopes to use rockets to deliver packages from one terrestrial location to another.
Spacety, founded in 2016, wants to turn around customer orders to build and launch its small satellites in just six months. In December it launched a miniaturized version of a satellite that uses 2D radar images to build 3D reconstructions of terrestrial landscapes. Weeks later, it released the first images taken by the satellite, Hisea-1, featuring three-meter resolution. Spacety wants to launch a constellation of these satellites to offer high-quality imaging at low cost.
To a large extent, China is following the same blueprint drawn up by the US: using government contracts and subsidies to give these companies a foot up. US firms like SpaceX benefited greatly from NASA contracts that paid out millions to build and test rockets and space vehicles for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. With that experience under its belt, SpaceX was able to attract more customers with greater confidence.
Venture capital is another tried-and-true route. The IDA report estimates that VC funding for Chinese space companies was up to $516 million in 2018—far shy of the $2.2 billion American companies raised, but nothing to scoff at for an industry that really only began seven years ago. At least 42 companies had no known government funding.
And much of the government support these companies do receive doesn’t have a federal origin, but a provincial one. “[These companies] are drawing high-tech development to these local communities,” says Hines. “And in return, they’re given more autonomy by the local government.” While most have headquarters in Beijing, many keep facilities in Shenzhen, Chongqing, and other areas that might draw talent from local universities.
There’s also one advantage specific to China: manufacturing. “What is the best country to trust for manufacturing needs?” asks James Zheng, the CEO of Spacety’s Luxembourg headquarters. “It’s China. It’s the manufacturing center of the world.” Zheng believes the country is in a better position than any other to take advantage of the space industry’s new need for mass production of satellites and rockets alike.
Making friends
The most critical strategic reason to encourage a private space sector is to create opportunities for international collaboration—particularly to attract customers wary of being seen to mix with the Chinese government. (US agencies and government contractors, for example, are barred from working with any groups the regime funds.) Document 60 and others issued by China’s National Development and Reform Commission were aimed not just at promoting technological innovation, but also at drawing in foreign investment and maximizing a customer base beyond Chinese borders.
“China realizes there are certain things they cannot get on their own,” says Frans von der Dunk, a space policy expert at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Chinese companies like LandSpace and MinoSpace have worked to accrue funding through foreign investment, escaping dependence on state subsidies. And by avoiding state funding, a company can also avoid an array of restrictions on what it can and can’t do (such as constraints on talking with the media). Foreign investment also makes it easier to compete on a global scale: you’re taking on clients around the world, launching from other countries, and bringing talent from outside China.
Although China is taking inspiration from the US in building out its private industry, the nature of the Chinese state also means these new companies face obstacles that their rivals in the West don’t have to worry about. While Chinese companies may look private on paper, they must still submit to government guidance and control, and accept some level of interference. It may be difficult for them to make a case to potential overseas customers that they are independent. The distinction between companies that are truly private and those that are more or less state actors is still quite fuzzy, especially if the government is a frequent customer. “That could still lead to a lack of trust from other partners,” says Goswami. It doesn’t help that the government itself is often very cagey about what its national program is even up to.
And Hines adds that it’s not always clear exactly how separate these companies are from, say, the People’s Liberation Army, given the historical ties between the space and defense sectors. “Some of these things will pose significant hurdles for the commercial space sector as it tries to expand,” he says.
Other challenges
None of these new companies are yet profitable, and it will be quite some time before they are. “There isn’t any sign of indication that this industry will flop,” says Hines. “But many experts do think a lot of these companies will go out of business.” Apart from the challenge of attracting customers outside China, many companies are still trying to figure out who exactly their customers ought to be.
American companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin had billionaire founders ready to burn cash to take on large risks, push past big failures, and finally get off the ground. And while a Chinese billionaire entered the industry last year, “there is no Chinese Elon Musk to push these riskier ventures forward,” says Hines. It’s also unclear whether Chinese companies, even those supported by wealthy backers, will have that appetite for risk.
Zheng says one thing Spacety has offered is exceptional transparency with clients for whom it is developing satellites—something that’s still uncommon for Chinese firms. “Many of them have no kind of spaceflight experience,” he says. “They want to see and learn what goes on, but the large companies won’t allow for that. We’re different.”
Lastly, China needs to figure out a legal framework that can guide the commercial industry in more explicit terms, and specify what’s allowed and what is not. It is the only major space power without a specialized space law. (The American version is Title 51 of the United States Code.) While the hope is that free enterprise can generate innovation, national governments are still liable for whatever space activities a country’s private companies conduct. There’s a need to license and approve these missions, ensuring that governments know what they’ve signed up for.
Despite all this, China’s space industry is rolling forward. These new startups haven’t just adopted American business practices—they’ve also begun to embrace American startup culture as a way to foster business relationships and grow. During my video call with Spacety’s Zheng, the company’s Beijing CEO, Yang Feng, briefly dropped in to say hello, on his way back from a party where he’d been schmoozing and enjoying drinks with many peers and partners in the industry. “It’s part of the way we do business now,” Zheng said. “Innovation is not just new technology itself—it’s also a new way of doing things.”
The technology would likely be used first on infants born at 22 or 23 weeks who don’t have many other options. “You don’t want to put an infant on this device who would otherwise do well with conventional therapy,” Mychaliska says. At 22 weeks gestation, babies are tiny, often weighing less than a pound. And their lungs are still developing. When researchers looked at babies born between 2013 and 2018, survival among those who were resuscitated at 22 weeks was 30%. That number rose to nearly 56% at 23 weeks. And babies born at that stage who do survive have an increased risk of neurodevelopmental problems, cerebral palsy, mobility problems, hearing impairments, and other disabilities.
Selecting the right participants will be tricky. Some experts argue that gestational age shouldn’t be the only criteria. One complicating factor is that prognosis varies widely from center to center, and it’s improving as hospitals learn how best to treat these preemies. At the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, for example, survival rates are much higher than average: 64% for babies born at 22 weeks. They’ve even managed to keep a handful of infants born at 21 weeks alive. “These babies are not a hopeless case. They very much can survive. They very much can thrive if you are managing them appropriately,” says Brady Thomas, a neonatologist at Stead. “Are you really going to make that much of a bigger impact by adding in this technology, and what risks might exist to those patients as you’re starting to trial it?”
Prognosis also varies widely from baby to baby depending on a variety of factors. “The girls do better than the boys. The bigger ones do better than the smaller ones,” says Mark Mercurio, a neonatologist and pediatric bioethicist at the Yale School of Medicine. So “how bad does the prognosis with current therapy need to be to justify use of an artificial womb?” That’s a question Mercurio would like to see answered.
What are the risks?
One ever-present concern in the tiniest babies is brain bleeds. “That’s due to a number of factors—a combination of their brain immaturity, and in part associated with the treatment that we provide,” Mychaliska says. Babies in an artificial womb would need to be on a blood thinner to prevent clots from forming where the tubes enter the body. “I believe that places a premature infant at very high risk for brain bleeding,” he says.
And it’s not just about the baby. To be eligible for EXTEND, infants must be delivered via cesarean section, which puts the pregnant person at higher risk for infection and bleeding. Delivery via a C-section can also have an impact on future pregnancies.
So if it works, could babies be grown entirely outside the womb?
Not anytime soon. Maybe not ever. In a paper published in 2022, Flake and his colleagues called this scenario “a technically and developmentally naive, yet sensationally speculative, pipe dream.” The problem is twofold. First, fetal development is a carefully choreographed process that relies on chemical communication between the pregnant parent’s body and the fetus. Even if researchers understood all the factors that contribute to fetal development—and they don’t—there’s no guarantee they could recreate those conditions.
The second issue is size. The artificial womb systems being developed require doctors to insert a small tube into the infant’s umbilical cord to deliver oxygenated blood. The smaller the umbilical cord, the more difficult this becomes.
What are the ethical concerns?
In the near term, there are concerns about how to ensure that researchers are obtaining proper informed consent from parents who may be desperate to save their babies. “This is an issue that comes up with lots of last-chance therapies,” says Vardit Ravitsky, a bioethicist and president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute.
Last week, Elon Musk made the bold assertion that sticking electrodes in people’s heads is going to lead to a huge increase in the rate of data transfer out of, and into, human brains.
The occasion of Musk’s post was the announcement by Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, that it was officially seeking the first volunteer to receive an implant that contains more than twice the number of electrodes than previous versions to collect more data from more nerve cells.
The entrepreneur mentioned a long-term goal of vastly increasing “bandwidth” between people, or people and machines, by a factor of 1,000 or more. But what does he mean, and is it even possible? Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
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Everything you need to know about artificial wombs
Earlier this month, US Food and Drug Administration advisors met to discuss how to move research on artificial wombs from animals into humans.
These medical devices are designed to give extremely premature infants a bit more time to develop in a womb-like environment before entering the outside world. They have been tested with hundreds of lambs (and some piglets), but animal models can’t fully predict how the technology will work for humans.
The reason we can’t just wish away or “fix” complexity is that every solution—whether it’s a technology or methodology—redistributes complexity in some way. Solutions reorganize problems. When microservices emerged (a software architecture approach where an application or system is composed of many smaller parts), they seemingly solved many of the maintenance and development challenges posed by monolithic architectures (where the application is one single interlocking system). However, in doing so microservices placed new demands on engineering teams; they require greater maturity in terms of practices and processes. This is one of the reasons why we cautioned people against what we call “microservice envy” in a 2018 edition of the Technology Radar, with CTO Rebecca Parsons writing that microservices would never be recommended for adoption on Technology Radar because “not all organizations are microservices-ready.” We noticed there was a tendency to look to adopt microservices simply because it was fashionable.
This doesn’t mean the solution is poor or defective. It’s more that we need to recognize the solution is a tradeoff. At Thoughtworks, we’re fond of saying “it depends” when people ask questions about the value of a certain technology or approach. It’s about how it fits with your organization’s needs and, of course, your ability to manage its particular demands. This is an example of essential complexity in tech—it’s something that can’t be removed and which will persist however much you want to get to a level of simplicity you find comfortable.
In terms of microservices, we’ve noticed increasing caution about rushing to embrace this particular architectural approach. Some of our colleagues even suggested the term “monolith revivalists” to describe those turning away from microservices back to monolithic software architecture. While it’s unlikely that the software world is going to make a full return to monoliths, frameworks like Spring Modulith—a framework that helps developers structure code in such a way that it becomes easier to break apart a monolith into smaller microservices when needed—suggest that practitioners are becoming more keenly aware of managing the tradeoffs of different approaches to building and maintaining software.
Supporting practitioners with concepts and tools
Because technical solutions have a habit of reorganizing complexity, we need to carefully attend to how this complexity is managed. Failing to do so can have serious implications for the productivity and effectiveness of engineering teams. At Thoughtworks we have a number of concepts and approaches that we use to manage complexity. Sensible defaults, for instance, are starting points for a project or piece of work. They’re not things that we need to simply embrace as a rule, but instead practices and tools that we collectively recognize are effective for most projects. They give individuals and teams a baseline to make judgements about what might be done differently.
One of the benefits of sensible defaults is that they can guard you against the allure of novelty and hype. As interesting or exciting as a new technology might be, sensible defaults can anchor you in what matters to you. This isn’t to say that new technologies like generative AI shouldn’t be treated with enthusiasm and excitement—some of our teams have been experimenting with these tools and seen impressive results—but instead that adopting new tools needs to be done in a way that properly integrates with the way you work and what you want to achieve. Indeed, there are a wealth of approaches to GenAI, from high profile tools like ChatGPT to self-hosted LLMs. Using GenAI effectively is as much a question of knowing the right way to implement for you and your team as it is about technical expertise.
Interestingly, the tools that can help us manage complexity aren’t necessarily new. One thing that came up in the latest edition of Technology Radar was something called risk-based failure modeling, a process used to understand the impact, likelihood and ability of detecting the various ways that a system can fail. This has origins in failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), a practice that dates back to the period following World War II, used in complex engineering projects in fields such as aerospace. This signals that there are some challenges that endure; while new solutions will always emerge to combat them, we should also be comfortable looking to the past for tools and techniques.
Learning to live with complexity
McKinsey’s argument that the productivity of development teams can be successfully measured caused a stir across the software engineering landscape. While having the right metrics in place is certainly important, prioritizing productivity in our thinking can cause more problems than it solves when it comes to complex systems and an ever-changing landscape of solutions. Technology Radar called this out with an edition with the theme, “How productive is measuring productivity?”This highlighted the importance of focusing on developer experience with the help of tools like DX DevEx 360.
Focusing on productivity in the way McKinsey suggests can cause us to mistakenly see coding as the “real” work of software engineering, overlooking things like architectural decisions, tests, security analysis, and performance monitoring. This is risky—organizations that adopt such a view will struggle to see tangible benefits from their digital projects. This is why the key challenge in software today is embracing complexity; not treating it as something to be minimized at all costs but a challenge that requires thoughtfulness in processes, practices, and governance. The key question is whether the industry realizes this.
This content was produced by Thoughtworks. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
