On 5 October, the southern Turkish city of Antalya welcomed an unusual crowd: heads of space agencies, engineers in checked shirts, and entrepreneurs and investors exchanging business cards. The 77th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2026) opened there and runs until 9 October under the theme “The World Needs More Space”. It is the first time the congress has been held in Türkiye. Hosted by the Turkish Space Agency with the SAHA Istanbul Aerospace Cluster, it is expected to draw 5,000 to 10,000 participants, with more than 3,000 papers presented across the week.
An unusually crowded start to October
Widen the window a little and the news looks dense. On 7 October, South Korea’s domestically developed Nuri launch vehicle completed a successful fifth flight, carrying 14 satellites into orbit; its five primary satellites all made first contact with the ground. At almost the same moment in Antalya, the director-general of the European Space Agency warned against the militarisation of space, while the UAE’s first female astronaut and Austria’s first astronaut addressed youth events at the congress.
Go back six weeks. At 11:21 on 25 August, the first Long March 6C lifted off from Taiyuan carrying seven satellites, among them the Lingzhi-09 Thailand CubeSat built by GalaxySpace — the first time a Chinese commercial space company has developed, launched and delivered in orbit a complete satellite to a Southeast Asian customer.
Selling a satellite is no longer just handing over hardware
The deal repays a closer look. The customer is Thailand’s Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA). The satellite is a remote-sensing craft, collecting surface data on land, agriculture and ecology, while also supporting Thai universities in satellite design and ground-control teaching. GalaxySpace did not deliver a bare satellite; it supplied an integrated package of satellite, ground system and capability building: Thai engineers came to China for intensive training, and Chinese teams travelled to Thailand for hands-on teaching, taking the customer from using a satellite to understanding one. The company says it has launched 49 self-developed satellites, has serial-production capability, is pursuing an A-share IPO, and will next focus on markets in Belt and Road partner countries.
Earlier, on 12 February, China Great Wall Industry Corporation used a sea launch of a Smart Dragon-3 to orbit the PRSC-EO2 remote-sensing satellite for Pakistan’s SUPARCO, for land mapping, agricultural assessment and disaster monitoring.
Every contract and manual is a cross-language project
Exporting space systems is nothing like exporting consumer goods. From negotiation to delivery, the document list is long: bilingual procurement contracts and technical specifications, export-compliance material, subsystem interface documents, test reports, ground-station operating manuals and user-training material. The terminology is dense, the documents go through repeated revisions, and numbers, units and standard identifiers must not drift by a single digit. Training material has to be rewritten for the learners’ language and background rather than converted sentence by sentence from a Chinese manual. Framework cooperation agreements and intellectual-property clauses, meanwhile, are treated to legal-document standards.
It is no accident that one of the most common corridor conversations in Antalya, away from the plenaries and technical sessions, is about aligning documents and standards. Space is a heavily standardised industry, and carrying those standards across languages is itself part of the engineering. How we run these projects is described in “Satellites Need to Speak the Local Language: the Multilingual Technical Files We Handle for Space Companies”, while “Want to Translate for the Space Sector? A Skill Checklist from the Antalya Congress” is written for translators entering the field. If you have technical proposals or manuals coming up, our document translation page sets out the service.