We must not allow a Heavenly Gap!!! Those godless commies are gonna ice Jesus!
This nation shall redouble its efforts to locate, positively identify, and successfully extract the Mandate of Heaven before J.C. ends up even holier!
On a more serious note, this is a great example of ESAs' growing ubiquity among Chinese RF sensor systems, even in the civilian sector. The colossal scale of the CN electronics manufacturing sector - combined with extensive domestic, vertically integrated supply chains for RF devices - has enabled the production of civilian ESA systems at high enough volumes (and low enough costs) for a diverse and innovative production ecosystem to emerge. In addition, due to the Chinese GaN industry's massive growth recently, its usage in both military and civilian AESAs has grown increasingly common.
Over the past couple years, these factors have all coalesced into a world-class domestic RF sensor system market. An expansive catalogue of both GaA and GaN based ESA systems - all of which thoroughly outclass their MSA functional equivalents - are offered at competitive, or sometimes outright superior prices than analogous MSAs (for lotsa reasons, but it's out-of-scope for this reply). With that in mind, plus the fact that - by nature - AESA systems are more robust, less prone to failure, less expensive to run, and typically simpler to set up and operate, it's no mystery why ESAs (especially GaN-based systems as they continue to proliferate) make up a rapidly growing share of the civilian systems in use.
