Geely’s Satellite Bet Reaches Cars Before 72 Satellites

Geespace has 64 low Earth orbit satellites flying for Geely, eight short of the 72-satellite first network it set for 2025.

The February 2024 lift of 11 spacecraft from Xichang showed a car group could mass-produce satellites. The open half of that wager is a full commercial license and the last eight satellites.

Eleven Satellites Were the Factory Proof

On February 3, 2024, Geespace put 11 satellites into low Earth orbit from Xichang and closed the second plane of the Geely Future Mobility Constellation, also called GEESATCOM. Nine spacecraft on the first plane had gone up in June 2022. The company, founded in 2018 with Geely backing, said it had already begun making satellites in volume and running constellation-level tracking and command.

Geespace compared that IoT role to Iridium Next, not to a home broadband network. Direct-to-cell was on the 2024 design sheet, and the second phase was then described as 168 more satellites for centimetre-level positioning. Later company briefings stretched the map: 264 satellites for phone links, then 5,676 for broadband. The 2024 launch was still a car play. In 2023 the group had already begun fitting satellite radios on production vehicles, which it called a first for the auto trade.

Tony Wang, the founder and chief executive, came from Huawei and the Chinese Academy of Sciences micro-satellite institute. He has said Geely chairman Li Shufu’s value was not only a captive car fleet but the habit of building things on a line. That is the bet worth scoring: own the satellites, the chips, and the cars, then sell a backup link where terrestrial networks drop.

The Missing Eight Satellites of Phase I

Geely Holding said the sixth plane rode a sea launch off Rizhao, Shandong, on September 24, 2025, putting 12 satellites on one rocket. That mission was the third networking flight in two months and the sixth since 2022. The company counted 64 satellites in orbit after six launches, including earlier test craft, and called Phase I deployment complete, with 100% in-orbit reliability as its own figure.

The same release still pointed at 72 satellites for three-to-four-layer coverage. Phase I was drawn as 72 spacecraft, including 8 backups. Those eight have not been cataloged. Public launch logs still show the September 24, 2025 sea mission as the last Geespace networking flight. In a May 2026 interview, Wang said the company would keep launching that year and finish the 72, lifting daily capacity from 340 million sessions to 450 million. The extra eight never showed.

THE SIX NETWORKING FLIGHTS

The last three groups flew on Jielong-3 rockets from waters near Rizhao, after the early missions used Xichang. Geespace also reported eight satellite gateway stations finished in 2025. Coverage is described as real-time between 60 degrees north and south, excluding the poles, with one-to-two layers until the remaining eight fly.

The Radios Went Into Production Cars First

The constellation was never sold as a dish on a roof. Geespace built chips, modules, and vehicle terminals and pushed them through Geely brands while the orbital count was still in the dozens. Satellite communication technology went into mass-produced cars in 2023, according to the company’s own timeline, starting with Zeekr performance models and then spreading through Galaxy and Lynk and Co.

In April 2025 Geespace signed with China Unicom on connected-vehicle work. China Unicom in-vehicle satellite tests in 2025 covered messaging, voice, image transfer, and live location when ground networks failed. In July 2025 it signed with CaoCao Mobility, Geely’s ride-hailing arm, to keep robotaxis reachable for remote monitoring and emergency intervention.

GEely BRANDS ALREADY CARRYING THE LINK

• Zeekr 001 FR: Early mass-production satcom fit, sold as two-way satellite messages when cellular drops.
• Zeekr 009 Grand: Same satellite stack on the large MPV, aimed at long-distance family trips.
• Lynk and Co 900: Plug-in SUV listed with satellite communication as a production feature.
• Galaxy E8 and Starshine 8: Volume Galaxy models using Geespace terminals for backup messages and location.
• Galaxy Cruiser 700: Off-road SUV that Geely said began large-scale factory fitment of Geespace LEO IoT hardware on August 28, 2026.

Geely’s careers account presented the Cruiser 700 fitment as the first large-scale OEM install of that LEO IoT stack in a passenger car. Ground cellular stays the main path. The satellite channel is a low-power backup for location, tracks, and distress traffic in mountains, desert, or on water.

From orbit to mass production🛰️

On Aug 28, Geespace’s LEO satellite IoT technology entered large-scale OEM production with the Geely Galaxy Cruiser 700.

At Geely, frontier technology doesn’t stay in the lab — we turn it into real mobility.#Geespace #GeelyCareers #SatelliteIoT pic.twitter.com/auND534EWM

— Geely Global Careers (@GeelyLifevbmo) September 1, 2026

That sequence is the quiet punch of the wager. The cars were shipping with the radios while the ministry still had not licensed Geespace to sell satellite IoT as a business inside China.

A Taizhou Line Builds Each Satellite in 28 Days

The hardware bet sits in Taizhou, Zhejiang. Geespace finished a satellite megafactory in 2021 rated at 500 spacecraft a year. Taizhou Geesatellite Technology, the manufacturing unit Wang also chairs, runs an assembly, integration, and test hall that the company says mixes auto-plant tooling with spacecraft work. Liu Yong, the plant’s general manager, said the production cycle cut to 28 days from one or two years, with a daily cadence of one to two satellites on a line that can handle craft from about 10 kilograms to one metric ton.

In 2025 Geespace said it took 2 billion yuan ($281 million) from the Zhejiang New Energy Vehicle Industry Fund to speed the constellation and a new headquarters. That round is the cash that bought sea-launch cadence last summer, not a Starlink-scale capital pile. The factory can theoretically turn out far more than 72 satellites a year. The constraint that showed up instead was permission to bill for the network, and the choice not to fly the last eight backups on the 2025 calendar.

CAPACITY THE COMPANY PUTS ON THE 64-SAT NETWORK

• Daily sessions: 340 million communications, rising to 450 million if all 72 Phase I satellites fly.
• User design load: 20 million users worldwide, about 5 million high-frequency and 15 million medium- and low-frequency.
• Packet size: 1,900 bytes per message for text, voice clips, and still images.
• Price claim: Geely Holding said IoT fees are 1 percent of traditional satellite-communication prices.

Those figures are Geespace’s own engineering claims, not audited traffic. They still describe a machine built for short, cheap, hard-to-jam bursts, which is what a car needs when a tower disappears, not a streaming pipe into a living room.

Beijing Licensed a Trial, Not a Full Network

On August 20, 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology approved Zhejiang Geespace Technology Co., Ltd. for a two-year satellite IoT commercial trial. During that period the company may pilot IoT service on the Geely Future Mobility Constellation’s first phase, in smart transport, marine fisheries, energy, and water projects. The ministry framed satellite IoT as a complement to broadband satellite internet and as a wider opening of the field to private firms.

Geespace’s own site records the August 2026 license and says it is also running IoT non-terrestrial network trials aimed at later 6G satellite work. A trial is not a standing nationwide operating right. It is a clock. Two years from August 2026 is the window in which Wang’s “value realization” test either prints recurring bills or stays a captive feature on Geely metal.

The real inflection point of the industry is not the completion of the constellation, but the beginning of continuous paid use.

Tony Wang, CEO, Geespace

Wang has split commercial space into three stages: capability, scale, and value. He told an interviewer that Geespace had cleared the first two and was entering the third. That line only holds if someone other than Geely’s own brands keeps paying after the trial. The cars already prove the terminal works. They do not prove a standalone satellite-IoT business.

What Geespace Sells That Starlink Does Not

GEESATCOM is a low-speed IoT network with 1,900-byte messages, not a consumer broadband constellation. It is built for vehicles, boats, machines, and sensors that need a small, cheap path when terrestrial coverage ends, and Geely Holding said the current 64 satellites give one-to-two-layer coverage between 60 degrees north and south.

In satellite-enabled vehicle networking, the company says the system can confirm position in real time and pass short messages so a car is not mute off the grid. Emergency traffic can be given higher priority. Construction kit can sit on a low-power, low-frequency mode for long idle stretches. That is not a substitute for a dish that fills a house with video. Treating the 2024 Xichang launch as a SpaceX challenge mixed up two products that share an altitude band and almost nothing else.

Geespace also leans on UHF and VHF, a band choice that favours reach and diffraction over throughput. That is a backup-network design. Starlink’s fight is capacity and consumer terminals. Geespace’s fight is whether a car, a trawler, or a crane will pay a small monthly fee to stay findable. The 2024 press materials even named Direct-to-Cell as a design goal; the live service is still a dedicated terminal in the vehicle, not a random handset talking to Geely’s birds.

Middle East Contracts Are the 2026 Test

The first overseas commercial deployment test ran in Oman in June 2024 with Azyan Telecom. Geely Holding reported a 99.15% communication success rate and network availability above 99.97% on that trial. Geespace now lists operator deals across Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kenya, Algeria, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina, and says it has agreements in more than 20 countries. Wang said intended orders in the Middle East and South America were meant to move into delivery in 2026, shifting the company from one-off projects to a service book.

At Mobile World Congress Shanghai in June 2026, Geespace said more than 200 firms had joined an open program around the constellation, with signed orders above 100 million yuan in construction, energy, agriculture, and low-altitude work. That is a small number next to a 2 billion yuan funding round, and it is still intention plus early contracts, not a disclosed run-rate. Fishing boats in Taizhou and maritime law-enforcement craft in Zhejiang are the domestic proof points sitting beside the Galaxy dashboard.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Orbit count: 64 satellites after six launches, last networking flight September 24, 2025.
• License: A two-year MIIT IoT commercial trial dated August 20, 2026, not a full operating license.
• Cars: Production Geely, Zeekr, Lynk and Co, and Galaxy models already carry Geespace terminals, with Cruiser 700 factory fitment announced for August 28, 2026.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The last eight: No public date for the remaining Phase I backups that would take the network to 72.
• Paid use: No disclosed figure for recurring overseas or domestic IoT bills outside Geely’s own fleet.
• After the trial: No stated path from the two-year permit to a standing commercial licence.

The 11 satellites that left Xichang on February 3, 2024, did what they were built to do: prove a car company could fly its own plane of IoT spacecraft. The radios are in showrooms. The unpaid items are still the same two: eight satellites that never left the pad, and a ministry clock that runs for two years before anyone knows if the rest of the world will pay.