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Taiwan’s ambitions in the international space race are taking a bold step forward as a device developed by its national space agency prepares for launch aboard a multinational satellite mission led by the U.K.
The mission, dubbed Faraday Dragon, is scheduled for launch next year. Spearheaded by In-Space Missions, a subsidiary of British defense giant BAE Systems, the project will carry around 16 payloads from across the Asia-Pacific region—including a Taiwanese-made star tracker developed by the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA).
“It hosts roughly about 16 payloads from various institutes and different countries,” said Frank Lo, who heads TASA’s Office of International Cooperation. “It actually provides a good platform for TASA, through these platforms to cooperate and collaborate and to have dialog with other stakeholders in the Faraday Dragon program.”
The satellite is expected to feature technology from Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore. It’s part of BAE’s broader push to expand in the rapidly growing commercial space sector, where private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX currently dominate.
For Taiwan, which is still developing its own rocket launch capabilities, such rideshare opportunities are crucial. Devices like the star tracker need what’s called “flight heritage”—real-world time in orbit to prove their reliability and performance.
The star tracker plays a vital role in navigation, using constellations to determine a spacecraft’s orientation in space. In testing, engineers simulate space conditions using a dark screen that mimics the star-filled sky. Though nearly invisible to the human eye, the tracker can identify each star down to its catalog number.
Perfecting this home-grown technology is a step toward Taiwan’s broader goal: increasing the number of domestically developed components aboard future space missions.
Lo said the Faraday Dragon mission could serve as a turning point for TASA and its long-running FORMOSAT program, a series of satellite missions launched since the late 1990s for remote sensing and weather monitoring.
“We already working on our own ridesharing project,” Lo said. “By 2031, actually, we will launch Formosat-8 and Formosat-9.”
He added that TASA plans to make room on these future satellites for third-party scientific and commercial payloads. “We already reserved certain space and mass that could accommodate other parties’ payloads to put their scientific or commercial payload on our Formosat-8 or -9 satellite.”
As Taiwan advances its technological capabilities, the agency hopes to not only bolster its domestic space sector but also offer emerging players a chance to launch their own devices into orbit—strengthening collaboration across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
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