Tech Asia: Inside Taiwan's most ambitious space mission yet

Big spending increase propels aim of homegrown satellite constellation, launch site and first rocket by 2034

25. Juli 2026 um 18:00 Uhr / Von Cheng Ting-Fang und Lauly Li, Nikkei Asia

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A demo of "Beyond 5G LEO Satellite", which is the first communication experimental satellite program in the country made by Taiwan Space Agency (TASA), is displayed during Taipei Aerospace and Defence Technology Exhibition in Taipei on July 18, 2025. (Bild: I-HWA CHENG/AFP via Getty Images)) — A demo of "Beyond 5G LEO Satellite", which is the first communication experimental satellite program in the country made by Taiwan Space Agency (TASA), is displayed during Taipei Aerospace and Defence Technology Exhibition in Taipei on July 18, 2025. Bild: I-HWA CHENG/AFP via Getty Images)

On a late winter night last December, Huang Po-Hsuan, his team and their colleagues waited anxiously in the control room at the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA), their eyes fixed on screens. They were waiting for the first image taken by the recently launched Formosat-8A satellite to be transmitted back to Earth.

"All of us were very nervous," Huang, director of the agency's optical payload team, said when recalling the moment to Nikkei Asia at TASA headquarters in the city of Hsinchu, in northwestern Taiwan. "The wait was extremely grueling. The satellite transmitted several times over the North Pole and South Pole ground stations, but we just couldn't download the image."