BeiDou Navigation Satellite System
node
China's global navigation system, built in three deliberate generations: a regional demonstration system from 2000, a regional operational system from 2012, and the global BeiDou-3 constellation whose final satellite was launched in June 2020 and which was formally commissioned the following month. Its architecture is unusual in mixing medium Earth orbit with inclined geosynchronous and geostationary satellites, which strengthens coverage over China and the surrounding region, and it carries a short-message service that lets a terminal send text as well as receive position — a capability the other global systems lack and which has been used in Chinese fisheries, disaster response and, latterly, consumer handsets. BeiDou matters to the space economy less as a revenue line than as evidence of the pattern: the world now has four independent state-funded global navigation systems giving away their civil signals, because each state judged dependence on another's unacceptable. Not a place.
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