By It already has the world’s largest navy, but new satellite imagery shows that China is developing a huge nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that would rival the biggest vessel in the American fleet, five analysts told NBC News after studying new satellite imagery.
The images of China’s Dalian shipbuilding facility in northeast China suggest that the new ship will allow fighter jets to be launched from four parts of the flight deck, leading analysts to conclude that the images suggest a new ship design — unlike anything now in the Chinese fleet.
The analysts made the assessment after examining images provided to NBC News by Maxar Technologies, a defense contractor headquartered in Colorado used by the U.S. government.
China’s three current aircraft carriers have the capacity to launch jets from only three parts on the front and the waist, or center, on the deck. Its latest supercarrier, the recently launched Fujian, a Type 003, has three electromagnetic catapult launching systems to propel fighter jets, Duitsman said.
The U.S. has 11 supercarriers that can launch from four places.
“We think this is them testing equipment and layouts for the upcoming Type 04 carrier,” Michael Duitsman, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a California-based nongovernment organization devoted to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, said in a video call this week.
The general consensus, he said, is” that the new carrier will have four catapults,” which would allow more planes to take off and match U.S. carriers like the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier. To accommodate four catapults, the ship will need to be larger than the Fujian, matching American tonnage and powered by a nuclear reactor.
The satellite images of China’s Dalian shipbuilding facility in northeast China show an engineering prototype of a module with two tracks, or trenches.
These tracks “obviously are related to catapults,” said H.I Sutton, an independent naval analyst based in the U.K. “But this is not the actual carrier under construction. Instead what it suggests is that the yard is gearing up to produce carriers,” he said in a telephone interview last week.
