Where are we on the space race in Malaysia and Singapore?

We'll come back to that. But first: in the past 60 days, both Malaysia and Singapore made the boldest space moves of their existence. Singapore consolidated. Malaysia multiplied. And if you live, invest, or work in this region, the space race here just stopped being theoretical.

I sat down with Cedric Ng at Asia Tech x Singapore on Thursday. He works in Global Business Development at Space Faculty — the Singapore organisation that specialises in talent and workforce development in the space sector. He's extremely well-educated on the industry and a genuinely dope dude. He's been watching the Malaysia–Singapore space corridor get described in diplomatic press releases for years, and he's one of maybe a dozen people in the region who actually know what those releases leave out.

What he told me was simple:

I feel like there should be more collaboration together. The industry should be more well-known in SEA.

That's the polite version. The harder version — the one you arrive at after a week of checking what he said against the public record — is this: the corridor is real on paper, slow in practice, and still waiting for someone to make it commercial.

I went to Singapore expecting a story about two ASEAN neighbours competing. What I came back with is something more interesting.

So — what does each country actually look like right now?

Singapore: institutional consolidation, executed quickly

Why would a country of six million people suddenly need six government agencies on one space committee?

On 1 April 2026, Singapore did something it hadn't done before. It created a National Space Agency.

It's called NSAS — the National Space Agency of Singapore. It absorbs everything OSTIn (the Office for Space Technology & Industry) was doing and sits under the Ministry of Trade and Industry. CEO is Ngiam Le Na.

That sounds bureaucratic until you notice the scaffolding around it. The Singapore Space Summit in February — held two months before NSAS even existed — was co-endorsed by six different government bodies: CAAS (Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore), DSTA (Defence Science and Technology Agency), IMDA (Infocomm Media Development Authority), MPA (Maritime and Port Authority), SECB (Singapore Economic Cooperation), and SGInnovate (the government's deeptech investor). Six agencies, one space committee. In a country of six million people.

What are they actually agencifying? About 70 space companies and 2,000 professionals across the value chain. Transcelestial on laser comms. SpeQtral on quantum-secure satellite networks. Equatorial Space Systems building rockets out of Tuas. Astroscale Singapore on orbital servicing. Kacific on Pacific broadband. Plus three NTU-led satellite launches scheduled for 2026, 2027, and 2028 — one a year, on a metronome.

Read generously, the move is about legibility. Agencies talk to agencies. Companies talk to companies. The new institutional layer means the people who need to find Singapore — investors, partner agencies, talent — can.

Malaysia: building outward, in three places at once

Why three spaceports? Why not one big national one like everyone else does it?

Malaysia's space story moves on a different rhythm. Less ribbon-cutting, more groundwork.

The frameworks are in place. DAN 2030 — Dasar Angkasa Negara 2030, the National Space Policy — is the headline. SISP 2030 — the Space Industry Strategic Plan — converts policy into sector targets. MYSA (the Malaysian Space Agency) sits under MOSTI (the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation). MASIC (the Malaysian Space Industry Consortium) coordinates the 79 local space-sector companies that came online between 2017 and 2023. MIGHT (the Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology) runs the cross-border industry engagements.

What Malaysia has that Singapore doesn't is geography. The country sits between 1° and 7° north of the equator, which for a rocket is a real, durable, physical advantage. Launching near the equator gives you a roughly 460 m/s free boost from Earth's rotation — that translates to 15–25% more payload to orbit. French Guiana's whole space economy is built on this physics. So is Wenchang's, in Hainan. Now Malaysia wants in.

Three separate spaceport initiatives are underway, each led by a different state:

• Lahad Datu (Sabah) — vertical satellite and rocket launch facility. Feasibility studies complete, construction could start in 2026, operational target 2029.
• Pahang Aerospace City — an 11,328-acre integrated aerospace zone with a 1,000-acre dedicated space precinct ("Space City Asia") inside it. Horizontal launch facility planned. Projected to add ~RM10 billion to national GDP and 2,350 jobs.
• Sarawak Spaceport — earlier-stage, state-level initiative.

Three states, three blueprints. That's how Malaysian infrastructure usually gets built — state-led, federally-blessed, partner-funded. Which is exactly why Pahang has the most interesting story right now. More on that in a minute.

Space Faculty: where this story started

Why does a country with no space tradition need its own space education organisation?

Before I get into the most loaded development in either country, let me bring you back to who got me into all this.

Lynette Tan founded Space Faculty in 2021. When she graduated, there was no clear path into the space industry in Singapore. So she built the institution she wished had existed.

Today Space Faculty runs the International Space Challenge for students, a Space Internship Programme matching young people to working space companies, and curriculum collaborations with Singapore Polytechnic. Their executive programmes — conducted by global experts — have been completed by more than 200 professionals from across Southeast Asia, spanning industry, government, and academia. It also runs mentor-student workshops — I sat in on one at ATxSG where NTU undergraduates interviewed industry experts from Rocket Lab, Interstellar Mapping, and others who actually work in orbit. Most useful 40 minutes of my week. Mind blown at the same time.

Cedric handles the cross-border conversations — Malaysia, Indonesia, the rest of ASEAN. He's the reason this piece exists. Everything below came out of one conversation with him, then a week of digging.

Now, about China and Pahang

Remember the hint at the top? Here it is.

On 15 April 2026, China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC) signed a Letter of Intent with the Pahang State Development Corporation and Lestari Angkasa for a feasibility study on what could become the Pahang International Spaceport. Site at 3–4°N latitude. One-year study. A Malaysian delegation went to visit Wenchang Space City in Hainan in May to continue the conversation.

If this advances past feasibility — and feasibility studies often quietly don't — Pahang would host China's first overseas launch site.

So is Malaysia switching sides?

Worth being specific. Malaysia signed the Artemis Accords in 2025, joining the US-led coalition on lunar governance. The CGWIC LOI is something different — it's a commercial launch infrastructure conversation. The two answer different questions. Countries with valuable geography routinely work with multiple international partners. France works with Europe and commercial customers. Kazakhstan rents Baikonur to Russia and others. Malaysia is doing the equatorial version of the same thing.

But "we're not switching sides" and "we're hosting Chinese rocket launches" are also two different sentences. Which one Pahang ends up writing depends on what happens in the next twelve months.

The corridor, in practice

If everyone agrees the corridor is a good idea, why hasn't anyone actually built it?

Back to what Cedric said: "I feel like there should be more collaboration together. The industry should be more well-known in SEA."

The harder restatement: the corridor is real on paper, slow in practice, and still waiting for someone to make it commercial.

What's already happening: MASIC supported MIGHT–OSTIn (now NSAS) engagement at the Singapore Space Summit. The stated focus areas — earth observation for climate and disaster resilience, space situational awareness, industry development — are sensible.

What hasn't happened: a formal cross-border space MoU. A first commercial deal that puts both countries' assets in one contract structure. The big joint announcement that converts diplomatic warmth into something you can put on a balance sheet.

The candid version of the corridor concept — the one used privately in conversations like the one I had with Cedric: Malaysia's land and labour, Singapore's finance and investment. That's the gap. It's not a competition. It's a coordination problem that hasn't found its first commercial owner yet.

Three Headlines & a Lie — Malaysia–Singapore edition

Three of these are real, current stories from the past two months. One is fabricated. Spot the fake:

1. Singapore elevated OSTIn to the National Space Agency of Singapore on 1 April 2026
2. Pahang signed a Letter of Intent with China Great Wall Industry Corporation in April for a spaceport feasibility study
3. Singapore's NTU has three Space Access Programme satellites scheduled to launch annually through 2028
4. Malaysia's MYSA opened its first Singapore office in May 2026

(Answer at the bottom.)

What would tell us the corridor stopped being a conversation?

Three dates worth marking:

• Early July 2026 — NSAS hits its first 100 days. Worth seeing what concrete contracts get announced.
• Late 2026 / early 2027 — whether Lahad Datu actually breaks ground.
• April 2027 — verdict on the Pahang–CGWIC feasibility study.

If any two of those land, the corridor stops being a conversation and becomes something a Liftoff Asia reader can invest in, work in, or write about. Cedric will be the first person I call.

The lesson, if you want one

Every country in Asia has a comparative advantage someone else needs. Singapore has institutional weight and capital. Malaysia has geography and labour. Indonesia has scale. Thailand has logistics. Vietnam has manufacturing. The countries that learn to package their advantage for outside partners — and let the partner package theirs — win the next decade. The ones that hoard win nothing.

When you read "Country X is winning" or "Country Y is falling behind" in regional industry coverage, that framing is almost always wrong. Both countries are usually building. They're building different things. Your job — as a reader, an investor, a participant — is to figure out what each is actually building and where their pieces could combine.

That's the corridor. That's where the money is. That's the story nobody else is writing yet.

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Next issue, somewhere very different. I sat down with a lunar-economy founder at Satellite Asia who walked me through — for 27 minutes — exactly why companies that win lunar contracts go nearly bankrupt every single time. It's the most uncomfortable interview I've recorded. Drops next Sunday.

— shirley

Answer to Three Headlines & a Lie: #4 is fake. MYSA has no Singapore office — yet.