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A space event in Hong Kong, full of financiers, lawyers and family offices instead of rocket engineers. Hong Kong isn't trying to launch anything — it's pointing finance, insurance, law, logistics and education at the space economy. Five doors in, none of which need an engineering degree.
Shirley Saw 
Cheap reusable launch made space 97% cheaper — a tide that lifted every boat. But Asia's contribution was never the rocket; it's the rovers, the sample-return science, the navigation backbones and the talent the cheaper rocket now carries. What the region actually builds in space — and the one thing it still can't do.
Shirley Saw 
In February, sixteen days apart, China's Long March 10 flew for the first time and NASA pushed its crewed landing to 2028. A progress audit of both lunar programmes — hardware, budgets, timelines — and the single crater rim they're both aiming at.
Shirley Saw 
On June 12, JAXA flew the H3-30S: three liquid engines, zero solid boosters, half the price of the rocket it replaces. Everyone watches India for cheap launch — Japan is running the same race from the opposite end.
Shirley Saw 
Dr. Bidushi Bhattacharya read the commercial space boom from inside NASA's JPL a decade early, then moved to Singapore and built AstroHub. Her career is a playbook for founders, investors, and anyone reading where space goes next.
Shirley Saw 
Meet Nicholas Barnett — cotton chipper, oil and gas, lunar PhD. He and co-founder Andrew Hazelton run Interstellar Mapping and Interstellar Innovation. Two companies building the decision and de-risking layer of the Asian lunar economy.
Shirley Saw 
Three Asian countries already have hardware on the lunar surface. One has an orbiter active. A working brief on the layers, the gaps, and what to do about them — for investors, founders, policymakers, and corporates.
Shirley Saw 
Singapore consolidated. Malaysia multiplied. And one of Malaysia's three spaceport projects just attracted serious attention from Beijing.
Shirley Saw 
Artemis II just looped the Moon and broke a 56-year distance record. The bigger story: every Asian country is quietly picking a side in the next Moon race.
Shirley Saw 
A region is quietly building the next layer of orbital infrastructure. Why almost nobody — in Asia or out of it — is writing about it.
Shirley Saw Who's writing
Writer based in Malaysia. I cover the Asian commercial space industry the same way I'd want it covered if I were trying to build inside it — clearly, sceptically, and with the regional context that gets lost when the story is told from outside.
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