MAY 2007

China draws Africa into its orbit

By Bright B Simons, Evans Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe

ACCRA, Ghana - In 2003, China's sole international commercial satellite launcher, Great Wall Industry Corp , won a project bid to build, launch and maintain a satellite on behalf of an international client. The contract, signed in December 2004, will, once executed, represent China's first export of a full satellite package. The client was the West African state of Nigeria. 

The 5-ton Chinese Academy of Science and Technology-built DFH-4 clone satellite, with an impressive 15-year life span, is known as Nigcomsat-1. It will, upon successful launch, be the only transcontinental telecommunications satellite under the control of a sub-Saharan nation. By the time the Nigcomsat-1 contract was approved, Chinese international commercial launch activities had been suspended for about five years, and the country's space industry was gearing up for a spectacular return in 2005. 

The success of Great Wall's bid for the US$450 million project amid intense competition from 21 companies from countries including the United States, Israel, France and the United Kingdom showed where China's advantages in the international arena resided: space cooperation with developing countries on commercial terms. Not long after, Chinese firms landed deals in Brazil and Venezuela too, and continued to lobby through their government's diplomatic channels to enter South Africa, where key rival Russia continues to hold sway. 

Beijing, increasingly indulgent of its budding multinationals, is putting in extra effort to transform the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, a regional talking shop, into a more action-oriented South-South collaborative partnership. Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Peru, Iran, Pakistan and Thailand, all members of this forum, became targets of China-style quiet diplomatic lobbying. 



Russia is currently the partner of choice for most developing countries in commercial space relationships worth several hundred million dollars. China is hence looking at some very lucrative returns, should it succeed in convincing the Third World about the competitiveness of its offerings. Africa could provide it with a picture of success. It could do a lot with the Nigcomsat-1 project to showcase its readiness for massive aerospace projects. No stone was therefore left unturned in the design phase of the Nigerian satellite. It was designed to exude the latest in technological sophistication: radiation-hardened technology, onboard software reprogrammable ability, multi-factor safety feedback mechanisms, high fault sensitivity, and a top-of-the-range on-board switch-control operating system to ensure exquisite payload-rocket integration efficiency. The communication components of the satellite included a full 28-band spectrum across C, Ku, Ka and L transponders.
 

According to some observers, China even went to the extent of influencing a Sudanese company, Elrased Electronic Trading and Investment Ltd, to broach a $250 million equity investment to enhance the value proposition of the project to the Nigerian public. Elrased's boss, Major-General Khalil Mohd al-Sadiq, is a key fixture in the Sudanese ruling establishment whose devotion to Chinese interests in Africa knows no bounds. 

In December 2005, Nigcomsat-1 successfully passed a preliminary design review with flying colors and was scheduled to launch in mid-2006. 
From this point onward, what had been a smooth and plain-sailing process began to hit a few hitches. First, reported funding constraints prevented launch in 2006, and takeoff aboard an LM-3B vehicle from Xichang launch center was rescheduled for this January. But January passed without a full resolution of the funding situation, compelling another postponement, this time to the end of March. Xichang launch center has been designated as the launch site for this and 11 of the approximately 20 Chinese launches that will occur in the 2007 window. All parties assured the media that the recurrent delays had absolutely no technical components. 

However, a more serious development that somewhat tarnished China's carefully choreographed exhibition was the failure after the launch last year of Sinosat-II and later of Sinosat-III, both of which were based on the same Chinese Academy of Science and Technology-built DHF-4 platform that Nigcomsat-1 has been modeled on. 

None of these bumps on the road, however, as far as most observers can tell, have dented the enthusiasm of either party - China or Nigeria - for the project. In two weeks or so, we shall know how Nigcomsat-1 will fare. 

One thing that is already evident is that the Chinese space industry is transforming very fast. The old era of ideological motivation, when the song "The East is Red" blared from newly launched satellites to applause from ground audiences, died in the 1970s. The Europeans were shell-shocked to learn that China's answer to America's Global Positioning System (GPS) and Europe's proposed Galileo, Beidou, would not be strictly limited to military uses, but was also likely to deploy commercial applications. All along one of the financial strategies underpinning Galileo had been the prospect of selling subscriptions to Chinese firms. Well, too bad, China just warmed to capitalism. 

Chinese space leaders are acquiring an impressive feel for commercial opportunities in the global marketplace, and they shrewdly recognize that while the rich pickings are to be found in managing outsourced projects on behalf of Western corporations, it makes a lot of sense to build capacity by taking on challenging tasks in the developing world. Furthermore, several factors make it especially rewarding to seize market share in those parts of the world, particularly in underexposed Africa. 
For instance, one of the key recent trends in the global commercial satellite sector has been the downward slide of America's market share of the launch and manufacturing segments. As space trendologist Ryan Zelnio has recounted, US dominance of the industry has plunged from 83% of the manufacturing segment in 1999 to 50% last year (representing a drop from an average 25 successful international contracts in the peak year of 1996 to about 10 in 2006). The key beneficiary has, however, been European firms like Astrium and Alcatel, not China.

Zelnio attributes the US decline to unnecessary bureaucracy in the name of national security. China, obviously, was a key trigger of this US paranoia. Recently, Great Wall Industry was sanctioned by the US State Department for allegedly aiding Iran'weapons-of-mass-destruction efforts by supplying precision equipment, and is said to be subject to a probe by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Geopolitics is thus one reason China cannot hope to profit as quickly as it would want to from America's misfortunes. The other issue, as is the case in many other areas, is to do with national competence in other segments allied to the hard manufacturing and launching of satellites: for instance, financing, legal, and assorted project risk management. The British insurance industry, for example, according to Ryan Zelnio, dominates the global satellite underwriting business. 

That is why big, complex, multi-sector contracts like Nigcomsat-1 are just the sort of projects Chinese aerospace contractors will kill for. To get them, however, China will have to take on Russia, which means the cost of engaging in regions where military considerations are high on the space agenda can be very high, since Russia is formidable when it comes to space-military integration. Competition with Russia for Iranian contracts, to cite an example, will always prove tough. 

Egypt and Saudi Arabia, key rivals of Iran, have also been slow in moving into the Chinese space orbit. The two countries have commissioned a number of mini-satellites from Italy that they intend to launch from Ukrainian sites. Israeli intelligence officers believe that Egypt's Egyptsat-1 satellite, whose launch into orbit has been dogged by delays but is expected to happen early next year, is a spy satellite. It was built by Ukraine's Yuzhnoe Design Bureau and will launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome, a facility Russia rents from Kazakhstan. 

China will continue to play second fiddle to Russia only as long as it has to compete for projects with complex political and military motivations. Russian firms, such as Energomash, have in the past been successful in securing Iranian contracts only after agreeing to extensive technology transfers, and presumably China must have agreed to do the same in recent commercial agreements to send Iranian payloads into space. 

However, as the Chinese government's white paper "China's Space Activities in 2006" reveals, China is aiming for "world-class large space corporations to provide a market-based mechanism of development". 

Diversification away from politically driven enterprises toward broader commercial activities is therefore more in synch with China's professed vision. This is clearly the inspiration underlying the current phase of the country's development in the space field. In fact, since 1985, when it entered the global commercial satellite launch market, the broad principle that has guided the country has been to allow a relatively independent, strictly market-oriented aerospace sector to develop to parallel and perhaps subsidize more military and ideologically propelled space segments. 

This accounts for the reason that, despite the heavy rhetorical emphasis on military applications by some Communist Party officials, 71% of all the satellites developed and launched by China have been telecommunication platforms or remote-sensing systems, many of which have limited defense applicability. 

It is true that all space-exploration programs have so far been solely financed by Beijing, but even here efforts are accelerating to determine where commercial crossovers can allow private sector participation. Increasingly, universities, particularly elite ones like Tsinghua, are playing a crucial role in the research and development efforts underpinning ongoing progress. And that progress has been considerable. China has constructed many, many terrestrial hubs, of various sizes, to relay signals from its telecommunication satellites. The result is a spectrum of more than 27,000 international telephone channels providing coverage of at least 180 countries, meaning nearly every nation in the world. 

The industrial complex at the base of this growth continues to expand at a remarkable pace. One company, China Jiangnan Space Industry Corp, a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASIC), which produces GPS devices and missiles among other advanced high-tech products, alone employs 30,000 personnel. 

James Oberg, an independent aerospace operations consultant, in testimony to a US congressional subcommittee, debunked some widely held opinions about China's space program, notably the perception that recent Chinese space platforms are merely carbon copies of Russian and US ones. He nevertheless conceded that a significant proportion of China's technical output in this area comprises exact duplicates of foreign designs. 

This can be put into some sort of perspective by recalling that the US, for instance, spends as much as 15 times what China does. But the experiences of such countries as Israel and even India, which runs the world's largest constellation of remote-sensing satellites, using even fewer resources to achieve impressive gains, make a strong case for China to persist in the current path of intensifying pure market-based commercialization. 



China has become known for price effectiveness, and this is something it can leverage in the cost-conscious developing world. India sees itself as possessing the same advantage and is progressing quite steadily toward the capacity to launch satellite payloads above 3 tons, bringing it closer to the scale of modern telecom satellites. So Chinese cost effectiveness must be coupled to economies of scale, and thus to positive cost-quality ratios to remain a relative advantage. This may have something to do with Xinhua's announcement last month that China plans soon to unveil a new satellite-launching center, the country's fourth, at Wenchang in its southernmost island province of Hainan. Because of its low-latitude location, the new center will offer very high-energy payload efficiency, helping to keep costs low for clients. 

Meanwhile, extensive upgrades are being made to existing launching sites such as Xichang to ensure continuing commercial competitiveness. Since wide-ranging modernization in 1993, Xichang has been at the center of China's space commercialization drive. Nigeria's Nigcomsat-1 satellite will be launched by a Long March 3B carrier rocket from Xichang. 

The Africa factorNigeria's approach provides one window for looking at the unfolding situation in Africa. Here, what is evident is a classic switch from the West to China in search of putative national goals. Nigeria has had a space cooperation framework of a tentative sort with the US going as far back as 1958, when the Joint Propulsion Laboratory (which the Chinese visionary Hsue-Shen Tsien help found) brought mobile radio tracking stations into  the country. 
Indeed, it is believed that the first satellite-relayed live telephone call was between Nigeria's then-prime minister Taffawa Balewa and US president John F Kennedy. 

In 2003, when Nigeria commissioned its first satellite, it was manufactured in the UK and launched from a Russian base in Plestek. 

The shift therefore to China, so comprehensively, is noteworthy. The problem is that like so many of the switches of "allegiances" in Africa, it is predicated less on an understanding of Africa's own structural needs and more on a sounder if narrow-focused appreciation of external geopolitical trends. 

Nigerian strategists were perhaps shrewd in deciding to award the $450 million contract to Great Wall just when China is in a mood to impress developing countries. But it is unclear whether this particular project will do much in ensuring a sustained technology transfer to Nigeria. 

Contrast this with South Africa's approach. When in 2003 China successfully launched its manned space mission, Andrew Aphana, an official at the South African Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, told Xinhua that his country saw commercial space cooperation with China on the horizon. 

In fact cooperation already existed. For instance, China was maintaining a tracking ship alongside Cape Town's Table Bay harbor, and another telemetry, tracking and control station - one of the few outside China - is based in neighboring Namibia. But the broached cooperation is unlikely to follow the same pattern as the Nigerian case. 

In February 1999, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration successfully launched South Africa's satellite, SunSat. SunSat had been wholly designed, developed and built by South Africa. A commercial firm spun off the country's University of Stellenbosch had been responsible for managing the entire project. Toward the end of January this year, South Africa successfully completed the development of another satellite. By May, the satellite - SumbandilaSat - will be launched from a Russian submarine into orbit, whereupon its remote-sensing equipment is expected to begin delivering on the $68 million investment by providing useful geo-imaging information for use in agricultural, forestry and surveying research. 

Thus, should South Africa begin serious space collaboration with China, it will have the capacity not only to insist on copious technology transfers but, even more crucial, the capacity to utilize these transfers toward the local development of competencies. Its current collaboration with Russia is based on just such a framework. In a recent visit to South Africa, President Vladimir Putin pledged to expand the sphere of existing cooperation to embrace microgravity, navigation and space medicine, signaling that China will really have to up its game on the technology transfer front if it is to get in on the action. 

Whereas South Africa's government had invested much of its small budget in bolstering the capacity of the country's human infrastructure through public-private partnerships with institutions such as SunSpace and Stellenbosch, Nigeria has decided to send missions to the moon by 2030 - this at a time when such countries as India are pulling back to focus on the use of satellite systems in novel, socially transforming segments such as telemedicine. 

At this juncture, some readers may wish to question whether space research is even an appropriate arena at all for a developing country to be expending its resources on. Couldn't Nigeria have used the nearly $100 million it spent on establishing a space agency in 1998 on malaria eradication, for instance? This is a misconception. The same argument could have been made with regards to India's software industry when it started. 

In fact, space technology these days is not predominantly about space telescopes and Mars orbiting missions. Nigeria's satellites, for instance, when operational, will provide Internet access to parts of the country where telephone and fiber-optic networks are non-existent. It will provide an observation platform for monitoring the country's besieged pipelines; help in disaster relief by providing up-to-date data; and help better manage epidemics such as Guinea-worm infestation. It will also be crucial to geological forecasting to optimize food security and hydrological resources. 

Also, it is entirely possible that Africa's future may depend on how successfully it "leaps" a developmental phase such as industrialization or a green revolution and moves directly into technology-driven services. Indeed, these days only the boldest, or most reckless, economists hold out any future for Africa in traditional industrialization along the lines of steel mills and aluminum foundries. Space research, provided the priorities are respected, can be extremely beneficial to the development of human resources, especially as the technologies studied, developed and deployed in its course often find useful applications in less flamboyant-sounding areas such as agricultural engineering and consumer electronics. 

There is therefore every justification for developing countries, ranging from budding superpowers such as China to struggling states such as Nigeria, to pursue such technologies to whatever extent their resources permit and, while doing so, to collaborate with one another toward mutual goals. But for these to yield maximum returns, it is important that partners in such prospective joint schemes are each positioned in a manner that allows synergistic cooperation to flourish. 

At present, countries such as Nigeria make Africa seem like the weakest link in the chain. 


Bright B Simons is an adjunct fellow at the Center for Humane Education (Imani), an Accra-based think-tank dedicated to researching economic trends to glean practical public-policy insights for the benefit of government, business and civil society in Ghana. Evans Lartey is director of development at Imani. Franklin Cudjoe is the executive director of Imani.