Moving on to commercial companies, we also saw two rounds of funding, for JZYJ, Deep Blue Aerospace, and Galactic Energy. First, commercial rocket engine manufacturer Jiuzhou Yunjian
raised more than ¥100M in a round of financing with investors including Yunhe Capital, Huaying Capital, Pufeng Venture Capital, etc. The funding will be used to accelerate the company’s development of a reusable liquid methalox engine. As a reminder, JZYJ as an engine manufacturer is a supplier to China’s other launch companies, and they have already signed deals with Linkspace and Rocket Pi for rocket engines. The press release noted that JZYJ has signed a total of nearly ¥100M in contracts with 10 customers.
Secondly, commercial launch company
Deep Blue Aerospace announced a “nearly ¥200M” A-round of funding, coming primarily from private VCs with some limited connections to provincial governments. The funding is expected to go towards the development of the company’s Nebula-1 liquid-fueled rocket, as well as their Leiting-5 engine, and will also include R&D into areas such as 3D printing.
Last, but certainly not least, Galactic Energy announced that over 2 rounds in 2021, the company had raised a
truly massive ¥1.27B, which in addition to being ~US$200M, is also perhaps not coincidentally just a bit larger than the ¥1.2B each raised by Landspace and iSpace in 2020 (the previous biggest funding round). For a deeper dive into Galactic Energy, check out our interview with Liu Hong, one of the company’s Systems Engineers,
from late last year.
Turning to space tourism, Space Transportation revealed,
in an interview, its plans for the development of its space plane. The company is planning to complete technology verification before 2023; to develop and test a suborbital space tourism space plane between 2023 and 2025, and finally to develop and test a highly hypersonic, manned point-to-point transportation space plane between 2025 and 2030. An ambitious timeline for an ambitious company!