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Satellite photos in August 2025 showed the Dalian ship’s hull under construction with two large hull sections being built.

Fujian is conventionally powered.

China commissioned its first indigenously designed and built aircraft carrier, Fujian, in fall 2025.

Observers speculated that China’s next carrier, referred to as Type 004, would be nuclear powered.

China currently operates three aircraft carriers: Fujian, Shandong, and Liaoning.

The Jiangnan-built carrier conducted extensive sea trials and launched and recovered aircraft in 2025.

Satellites photographed initial preparations for construction of a new large ship at Dalian Shipyard in May 2025, with keel blocks laid out on the floor in the shape of a very large hull.

Available satellite photos of the Dalian ship have been lower quality compared with earlier imagery, which observers attributed in part to the increasing cost of imagery.

The Jiangnan-built carrier was commissioned and formally named Fujian.

By November 2025 satellite and aerial photos revealed two large square structures in the Dalian ship’s hull sections that resemble structures used to contain nuclear reactors in U.S. Navy nuclear carriers.

Western commercial reconnaissance satellites photographed the Fujian commissioning ceremony from overhead.

Liaoning and Shandong lack catapults, requiring their jet aircraft to take off under their own power with limited fuel and weapons and giving them limited aviation capabilities.

The presence or absence of exhaust ports on a carrier’s island is a visible indication used to confirm whether the ship is nuclear-powered.

China purchased the incomplete Soviet-era hull that became Liaoning from a Ukrainian shipyard in the 1990s.

Fujian is equipped with electromagnetic catapults and arresting gear.

The carrier built at Jiangnan Shipyard was launched in 2022.

Western satellites began photographing a large ship under construction at Jiangnan Shipyard in 2017.

By mid-October 2025 the two large hull sections of the Dalian ship were merged.

Shandong was launched in 2015 and is mostly based on the same design as Liaoning.

China released its own photographs of the Fujian commissioning ceremony.

China does not release updates on its current naval ship production.

The aircraft carrier Fujian is named after the Chinese province Fujian.

Liaoning was extensively overhauled and modernized and was launched in 2012.

Satellites are a primary source of public information on China’s latest naval developments.

A satellite operating in a proposed 2,000 km shell could accumulate 10–15 krad of total ionizing dose in less than a year, degrading dense memory stacks rapidly.

Sun-synchronous polar orbits force satellites to pass near the Earth’s magnetic poles approximately every 95 minutes, exposing them to enhanced radiation from the radiation belts.

A swarm of one million moving nodes creates one million contention points and imposes substantial computational overhead to maintain a consistent distributed database.

Uplinking exabytes of training data from Earth to orbit via radio is prohibitively slow compared with moving physical media.

Commercial High Bandwidth Memory commonly reaches a reliability cliff at total ionizing doses of about 10–15 krad.

Swarm orbital architectures envision thousands of small, flat, 12U-class server tiles that achieve passive radiative cooling by maximizing surface-area-to-volume ratio.

For roughly sixty years, launch costs between $10,000 and $2,000 per kilogram made mass the dominant design constraint in aerospace engineering.

Satellites that cycle into eclipse must carry sufficient battery capacity to maintain AI inference workloads through shadow periods, which shifts design optimization toward energy storage.

In a swarm orbital data center, each satellite functions as a node and router responsible for handing off data to neighbors, producing a constantly shifting network topology.

Reducing raw sensor data in orbit from 10 terabits per second to 100 gigabits per second cuts ground-station infrastructure costs by 100×.

Network partitions are unavoidable in orbital swarms, which forces designers to prioritize partition tolerance over simultaneously achieving perfect consistency and constant availability per the CAP theorem.

Optical space links still struggle to match the bandwidth density of physical media for bulk data transfer.

SpaceX filed an FCC application on January 30, 2026 for up to one million satellites explicitly targeting AI inference and Orbital Data Centers operating between 500 and 2,000 km including sun-synchronous inclinations.

Sun-synchronous dawn-dusk orbits form a single orbital plane at a given altitude, making it physically impossible for one million satellites to occupy that single plane without extreme collision risk.

Spreading a million satellites across multiple sun-synchronous planes causes many satellites to cycle through darkness for several minutes each orbit, forcing them to rely on onboard energy storage.

SpaceX’s Starship is designed for full reusability and to carry much more cargo per flight than previous vehicles, enabling potential launch costs below $200 per kilogram.

Edge orbital stations will ingest raw sensor data from adjacent satellites via optical links and downlink only refined insights.

A collision cascade (Kessler Syndrome) in a high-density shell at 2,000 km could permanently close off large portions of low Earth orbit for future use.

Rapid topology changes in a million-satellite swarm create severe jitter that makes synchronous, latency-sensitive applications like high-frequency trading and parallelized model training unsuitable for LEO ODCs.

Avoiding radiation-induced memory degradation at 2,000 km would require massive lead shielding that negates launch-cost advantages or accepting mission lives measured in months rather than years.

Operating shells as high as 2,000 km places satellites inside portions of the Inner Van Allen Belt that contain trapped high-energy protons.

A constellation generating 10 terabits per second of raw Earth-observation data cannot afford to downlink all collected data.