Chinese start-ups push into space business, plan to challenge SpaceX

Landspace needs roughly a further $115 million in capital to reach the stage where it can start commercial operations

Space is corporate China’s newest frontier, as Chinese startups prepare to boldly go head-to-head with the likes of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC for a slice of the space market.

It is still a risky business that must overcome complex technical challenges, as a high-profile rocket-launch failure over northwest China showed in late October. But with about 80 commercial Chinese space-technology startups now operating and competition heating up, the breakthroughs are likely to soon outnumber the disappointments, analysts say.

“Three years ago, no one imagined that a private Chinese company could do this,” said Lan Tianyi, founder of