Sustain Space

三垣航天科技有限公司

Sustain Space is a Chinese commercial on-orbit servicing company founded in June 2022 and based in Taicang, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. It is a subsidiary of Emposat, the Beijing-based commercial satellite TT&C and operations company, and its founder Zhao Lei, who also founded Emposat, has about 15 years of satellite development experience. According to the company, its core technical team includes doctoral and master's graduates from Northwestern Polytechnical University and Tsinghua University.

Sustain Space positions itself as a supplier of space operation technology, payloads and in-orbit services: removal of space debris and deorbiting of failed spacecraft, on-orbit propellant refueling, and in-orbit repair and manufacturing, with the stated goal of becoming a service station for satellites. In March 2024 it closed a Pre-A financing round worth tens of millions of yuan, led by Taicang Port Hongrun Capital, to build an experimental satellite. At that time the company reported capabilities in space situational awareness, target measurement and rendezvous, and said it had completed the design, manufacture and ground testing of a small on-orbit servicing pathfinder satellite and related space-operation payloads, including a self-developed debris capture mechanism.

Its first flight demonstrator, Yuxing-3 06, also designated Xiyuan-0, was launched on 16 March 2026 on a Kuaizhou-11 Y7 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center as one of eight satellites. Described by Chinese state media as the country's first commercial experimental satellite equipped with a flexible robotic arm, it carries a space flexible continuum manipulator developed by a team led by Professor Wang Xueqian at Tsinghua University's Shenzhen International Graduate School. The hollow continuum arm is built from flexible spring tubes connected in series that can curl, twist and coil, and is cable-driven from rear-mounted motors. In orbit the satellite carried out simulated refueling in three control modes: autonomous path planning from preset commands, ground teleoperation based on camera imagery, and vision-servo guidance using visual targets imaged by the camera at the arm tip, achieving precise docking with fueling ports. The company announced completion of these operations in late March 2026, and a representative quoted by the media said the next phase would involve actual propellant transfer between cooperative spacecraft.

Sustain Space CTO Chen Jing has said the arm was designed to be lighter, more agile and more reliable, and Emposat vice president Cao Meng has described the long-term aim as a one-stop maintenance and repair offering for space assets, in which a servicer locates a target satellite, performs rendezvous and docking, and then refuels it.