About Space Energy and Environment

Space Energy and Environment

Overview

Space Energy and Environment is an English-language journal hosted by the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China, selected on 5 December 2025 among the 70 high-starting-point new journals of Phase II of the 2025 China Scientific, Technical and Medical Journals Excellence Action Plan announced by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), and scheduled to launch in 2026. Its chief editors are HIT Vice President Shuai Yong and Academician Yu Dengyun of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), with Gao Jianmin, dean of HIT's School of Energy, as executive editor. The editorial board comprises five Chinese academicians and 51 high-level experts and scholars from China and abroad. The journal focuses on high-quality academic achievements in the interdisciplinary 'space + energy' field, providing an international academic exchange platform at the intersection of space technology, energy science and the environment.

Selection and HIT's Seven-Journal Record

CAST announced the list of 70 high-starting-point new journals selected for Phase II of the 2025 Excellence Action Plan on 5 December 2025. Space Energy and Environment and Intelligent Computing for Engineering, both hosted by HIT, were included, as was Advances in Astronautics, co-hosted by the Chinese Society of Astronautics and HIT. With these selections, HIT reached a total of seven journals selected for the high-starting-point new journal project: the International Journal of Smart and Nano Materials in 2022, Electron and SmartBot in 2023, Advanced Materials Jointing in 2024, and the three 2025 titles. Since the establishment of its journal center, HIT has had nine single journals and seven journals included in related projects of the CAST Excellence Action Plan. The Excellence Action Plan is jointly organised by seven ministries, including CAST, to promote the high-quality development of scientific and technological journals in China, and its High-Starting-Point New Journal Project supports newly established English-language journals that represent the forefront of disciplinary development and have significant growth potential. Space Energy and Environment thus launches as part of a mature, repeatedly successful institutional programme, not as a first experiment.

The Host: Harbin Institute of Technology

Harbin Institute of Technology, based in Harbin in China's far north-east, is one of the country's leading engineering universities, with a historically central role in China's aerospace enterprise: generations of HIT graduates and HIT-built instruments have served the national space programme, and the university's research spans astronautics, energy, materials and the environmental sciences. That profile is the journal's foundation. 'Space + energy' is not an arbitrary pairing at HIT; it describes two of the university's defining strengths, and the third element of the title — environment — names both the space environment in which spacecraft energy systems must survive and the terrestrial environment that energy technology must protect. A journal at this three-way intersection needed a host institution strong in all three, with an aerospace corporation's academician as co-editor and an energy school's dean running operations; HIT's structure supplies exactly that combination.

Chief Editors: Shuai Yong and Yu Dengyun

The journal's chief editors pair the university with the space industry. Shuai Yong is a Vice President of HIT and an energy-science leader whose portfolio represents the energy side of the title. Yu Dengyun is an academician from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the state aerospace corporation at the centre of China's space programme; he also serves as an associate editor of the sister HIT title Advances in Astronautics, whose chief editors are CASC academician Wang Wei and HIT President Han Jiecai, linking the new journal into HIT's existing astronautics publishing. Gao Jianmin, dean of HIT's School of Energy, is executive editor, placing daily academic operations in the school that anchors the energy side of the scope. The editorial board comprises five Chinese academicians and 51 high-level experts and scholars from China and abroad — a board of 56 named senior figures, comparable in structure to the 90-plus-member board of its sister journal Intelligent Computing for Engineering, and sized to cover a genuinely interdisciplinary remit that no small board could referee credibly.

Scope: The 'Space + Energy' Intersection

The journal focuses on high-quality academic achievements in the interdisciplinary 'space + energy' field. That field is real and growing: every spacecraft is an energy system operating under extreme constraint. Solar arrays, batteries, fuel cells, radioisotope and nuclear power sources, thermal control and power management decide what missions can do and how long they can do it, from Earth-orbiting stations and lunar surface systems to deep-space probes. On longer horizons, space-based solar power, in-space resource utilisation and planetary surface energy systems extend the field further. Research at this intersection — power generation and storage for space, energy conversion in extreme environments, thermal science for spacecraft, and the energy systems of launch and propulsion support — has historically been split between astronautics journals, where energy is a subsystem, and energy journals, where space is an exotic application. Space Energy and Environment is founded to be the venue where the intersection itself is the subject, refereed by a board drawn from both sides.

Scope: Environment, in Orbit and on Earth

The title's third term does double duty, and both duties are substantive research fields. The space environment — radiation, thermal cycling, vacuum, micrometeoroids, atomic oxygen and, increasingly, orbital debris — is the operating environment that degrades solar cells, batteries and thermal surfaces and limits mission life; understanding and mitigating it is core spacecraft energy science. The terrestrial environment is the second duty: energy science at HIT and internationally is now inseparable from environmental consequence, from the carbon burden of launch and manufacturing to the role of satellite observation in environmental monitoring and the design of cleaner energy systems informed by space-derived technology. By holding 'environment' in the title alongside space and energy, the journal declares that a paper's environmental dimension — of the mission, of the technology, or of the Earth system the technology serves — is in scope, not an afterword.

Why an International Platform, and Why Now

HIT's announcement states the journal's purpose as providing an international academic exchange platform for the 'space + energy' field. The timing reflects the sector's expansion: space activity worldwide is growing in launch volume, satellite numbers, lunar ambition and commercial participation, and every element of that growth is energy-constrained. China operates one of the world's largest space programmes through CASC and its partners, and HIT sits inside that programme's academic core. An English-language journal, launched under a national excellence programme with corporation and university academicians as chief editors, gives that research community a home journal with international reach, and gives the international community a refereed window into Chinese work in space power, spacecraft thermal science and space-environment effects that might otherwise appear only in domestic or conference literature. That exchange function — outbound and inbound — is the founding rationale the university itself states.

Place in the HIT Publishing Portfolio

Within HIT's seven high-starting-point journals, Space Energy and Environment occupies the astronautics-energy-environment niche, complementing Intelligent Computing for Engineering (artificial intelligence and computation), Electron, SmartBot, the International Journal of Smart and Nano Materials and Advanced Materials Jointing, and sitting alongside the older Advances in Astronautics (established 2018) as the energy-focused companion to a general astronautics title. The portfolio logic mirrors the XJTU and other university cohorts in the same national round: build, in a few selection cycles, a family of English-language journals that maps the host university's research strengths, each with academy-level editorial leadership and programme backing, so that the university's strongest research communities publish in the university's own international journals.

Status, Readership and Outlook

Space Energy and Environment is scheduled to launch in 2026 from Harbin. Its public record at the time of writing consists of its 5 December 2025 national selection, its named chief and executive editors, its 56-member board of academicians and senior experts, and its declared 'space + energy' scope — the complete founding dossier of a high-starting-point journal before its first issue. Its intended readership spans spacecraft power and thermal engineers, energy scientists, space-environment researchers, environmental scientists working with space technology, and the mission planners who integrate their work. For that readership, the journal offers a single refereed home for a field that previously had to borrow pages from two separate literatures — and for HIT, another flagship in a seven-title fleet built, selection by selection, since 2022.