Forefront | Accelerating the construction of a space brain, the "Digital Space One" test star project was officially launched in Beijing

Text | A Zhi In the past ten years, China's commercial aerospace industry has completed the first phase of its goal of "making it possible to deliver it to the public". Satellite production capacity has climbed rapidly, and the verification of recyclable rockets has moved towards intensive verification nodes. But when orbital resources turn from loose to crowded, and the focus of competition among countries shifts from launch capabilities to operational capabilities, it is crucial to "manage them well and use them well." According to calculations by the National University of Defense Technology, under the premise of maintaining a minimum safe distance of 50 kilometers between satellites, the full low-orbit space of 300-2,000 kilometers can only safely accommodate a maximum of about 175,000 satellites. When the number of satellites increases from several thousand to tens of thousands, the traditional way of queuing uplink and downlink instructions at ground stations will become unsustainable, and the existing satellite management and control model is also becoming ineffective. "In the next ten years, the main theme of aerospace development should be the digitization and intelligence of space." Wei Fengsi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, mentioned this core point in his speech in the Science and Technology Innovation Academician Lecture Hall last month. To be more specific, future satellites cannot have "only eyes and no brains." On July 26, the Commercial Aerospace Accelerating the Development of "Digital Space Strategy" Conference and the "Digital Space One" Test Star Launch Conference were held in Beijing. As the proposer of the "Digital Space Strategy", Academician Wei Fengsi pointed out at the scene that in the face of challenges such as the complex and changing space environment, increasingly crowded orbital resources, and large-scale constellation collaborative operations, future space infrastructure not only needs to continue to improve its sensing capabilities, but also build an intelligent system with cognitive, deduction and decision-making capabilities. "Space brain" is the core hub of digital space construction. It needs to form a brain intelligence system that is connected to the real space environment and connects "perception-cognition-behavior" to promote spacecraft from "ground command and on-board execution" to gradually moving toward limited autonomy and satellite-ground collaborative intelligent operation in risk scenarios. Wei Fengsi, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the so-called brain intelligence, simply put, is to integrate all three links of spatial perception, spatial cognition, and spatial behavior onto the satellite to form a millisecond-level full-chain intelligent closed loop, allowing satellites to behave like thousands of birds in nature, without colliding with each other and responding to environmental changes independently. The official launch of the "Digital Space One" test star project, a special