Communications

TIANQI-30

IoT communications · Guodian Gaoke

Tianqi-30 is one of four IoT relay satellites China launched together on September 20, 2024 aboard a Kuaizhou 1A rocket from Xichang, expanding the Tianqi constellation operated by Guodian Gaoke, a company affiliated with China's State Grid power utility. Like its cluster-mates, it's designed to collect and relay low-bandwidth data from unmanned ground sensors scattered across remote or hard-to-reach terrain — the kind of infrastructure monitoring, environmental sensing, and industrial telemetry that doesn't need broadband bandwidth but does need coverage where cellular networks don't reach. Given its operator's ties to the power grid, a natural application is monitoring dispersed electrical infrastructure across China's vast and often remote territory.