Beidou system to expand into HK
Move paves way for navigation service to access overseas markets in future
Hong Kong marks the first stop on the road to expanding the Chinese mainland’s self-developed Beidou Navigation Satellite System into a worldwide network, said a top executive of the company.
“The Asian financial center stands as the bridgehead and incubator to bolster the system’s ‘going global’ vision,” Zhang Zuxin, chairman of Hong Kong-based BD International Technology Group Ltd, told China Daily in Hong Kong on Thursday. “What’s going on in Hong Kong will essentially add flesh to the bones of the mega plan for the global venture of the system.”
The Hong Kong-based company has been built with the goal of applying the Beidou system for civilian use first in Hong Kong and then other overseas markets in the future.
As outer space becomes part of the Belt and Road Initiative, countries and regions involved in this initiative are on track to be among the first in line to plug into the Chinese mainland’s homegrown satellite navigation services by the year end. This paves the way for the system to deliver global coverage in 2020, when some 35 satellites will be in operation.
Beidou, which literally means Northern Dipper, the Chinese name for the constellation known in the West as the Big Dipper or the Plough, is the Asian economic power- house’s answer to the dominance of the US Global Positioning System.
The massive engineering project, jointly established by hundreds of government departments since the late 1990s, has been widely applied for civilian use across 169 sectors of the world’s second-largest economy, covering the Chinese mainland and more than 30 neighboring countries, Zhang said.
Hailed as a poster child of how indigenous innovation makes the Chinese mainland less dependent on foreign technology, the Beidou network fits in well with Hong Kong’s ambition to become a world-class smart city over the next five years, which was underscored by a long list of innovation initiatives rolled out by a local government blueprint released in December last year, he noted.
“Satellite-based navigation and positioning services proved to be an indispensable part of making almost every sector of the economy smarter,” Zhang said. “To bolster Hong Kong’s smart city vision, the Chinese mainland has what it takes to export its expertise. This is where the Beidou network could come in.”
The newly established company has joined hands with the Hong Kong Observatory, a weather forecast agency of the SAR government, to offer Beidou standard time services for local citizens, in a pilot project that will get off the ground in no more than two months, Zhang noted.
Such a project, he said, will put Hong Kong citizens on course to have GPS time and Beidou time work in tandem.
“The selling points of the Beidou network are accuracy and reliability. It is also a hedge against vulnerability from the overreliance on any one single system,” Zhang said. “From the outset, the Beidou network is designed to be completely compatible with the US GPS, Russia’s GLONASS service and the EU’s Galileo system. Behind our going global push is the pursuit of making the Beidou network an alternative to US, Russian and European services, giving countries the freedom of choice to have more than one system operate in tandem in the near future.”
Known as an international metropolis, Hong Kong is a natural choice to test the huge potential of the Beidou system, he noted.
“If we can make the city a showpiece of the network’s great benefits to the local economy and people’s livelihoods, we can clear up some deep-rooted misunderstandings and dispel doubt the world over,” he added.
The selling points of the Beidou network are accuracy and reliability.” Zhang Zuxin,