Cosmic Penguin

Ok, so Jonathan’s Zhongdian Wangtong 1A/B and the “two Tianxiang satellites” on your forum post are two names for the same sats then?

Yes. His summary should be better than mine.

I think 'tianxiang' may be a description rather than a name, but I am not a Chinese speaker. And Zhongdian Wangtong may be just an alternate name for the owner agency. So I'm not confident what the correct name for these two sats is.

I do wonder about that one - Tianxiang means "celestial events" so it's not quite the adjective one would expect for a Ka-band communication testing satellite. I must say that quite a few recent Chinese satellites have difficulties in nailing down their unique names....

For "Zhongdian Wangtong", "Zhongdian" is the Chinese short form for the CETGC; "Wangtong" is the short form for "network communications". Again, I'm not sure if that's the unique name the company has given to them, or if it's just a descriptive adjective!

OK so probably both are legit names, one more a project name (Zhongdian Network Comms Sat) and one more a name name (Tianxing)

err i mean (Tianxiang) of course

although "celestial events" could maybe be reconstrued as 'space data' ??