Beijing has fast-tracked a new landmark for China’s commercial space sector. The Beijing Rocket Street project in the E‑Town (Yizhuang) industrial zone — a 145,000 square metre complex combining common technology platforms, innovation R&D, high‑end manufacturing and an operations/display centre — has completed registration and entered delivery five months ahead of schedule.
The development is deliberately engineered as an industrial spine: eight service blocks spanning innovation centres, comprehensive commercial‑space services, shared test facilities and intelligent manufacturing aim to make “upstairs equals upstream and downstream” a literal reality, allowing companies to move from design to production and mission control within a contiguous campus. It will offer shared capabilities — from rocket and satellite test stands to air‑space‑ground integrated operations — that smaller firms typically cannot afford on their own.
The project is the clearest sign yet of Beijing’s ambition to consolidate its national lead in commercial space. Policy has elevated the sector rapidly: commercial space was designated a strategic emerging industry at the 2023 Central Economic Work Conference and appeared for the first time in the 2024 government work report. The Rocket Street plan was unveiled at a high‑profile industry conference in Yizhuang in February 2024 to attract full‑chain commercial space projects.
Beijing’s industrial geography already reflects a bifurcated specialism: a “south rockets, north satellites” pattern has emerged, with rocket integrators clustered in the southern development zones (including firms such as LandSpace, Interstellar Glory, Galactic Energy and others) and micro‑satellite makers concentrated in Haidian and surrounding districts. E‑Town has become unusually dense: more than three quarters of China’s commercial full‑vehicle rocket companies have operations there, and the city hosts the country’s highest concentration of commercial internet‑satellite firms.
For an industry that is inherently a systems‑of‑systems problem — where a single launch depends on tens of thousands of parts and precise coordination across suppliers — the Rocket Street model targets a familiar bottleneck. Co‑location reduces transport and coordination frictions, supports rapid iterative development, and can accelerate mass production and launch cadence, all of which are prerequisites if China is to field large satellite constellations or more frequent commercial launch services.
Beijing has set explicit quantitative goals for the sector through its 2024–28 commercial space action plan: achieve reusable‑rocket orbit return and reflight first in China by 2028, incubate more than 500 high‑tech firms and 100 specialist “little giant” companies, cultivate over ten unicorns and push more than 20 firms to listing. The municipal strategy pairs these industrial targets with ambitions to form billion‑yuan scale clusters and municipal commercial‑space parks that can compete internationally for talent, capital and contracts.
The new complex will likely accelerate consolidation and capitalization of China’s commercial space ecosystem, drawing venture capital and state investment into scalable manufacturing and integrated service providers. That shift strengthens Beijing’s ability to offer complete launch and satellite packages to domestic and export markets, but it also concentrates strategic industrial capabilities in ways that will attract closer state oversight and raise export and dual‑use policy questions internationally.
For global observers, Rocket Street is both a tangible piece of infrastructure and a signal: China is moving from dispersed startup activity to coordinated industrial scaling. The complex reduces practical barriers to growth for small and mid‑size space firms, but it also formalises Beijing’s role as the country’s commercial space command centre and sets the tempo for the sector’s next, faster chapter.