China's top-secret spaceplane can't hide in low-Earth orbit

Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Minimize to nav A winged Chinese spacecraft bearing a strong resemblance to the US military’s X-37B spaceplane was photographed in orbit by a passing US-owned commercial satellite in 2024, and we finally have the image. The Chinese spaceplane has delta wings, payload bay doors, a dark heat shield, and a rear-mounted service module with power-generating solar arrays. In other words, the design of the winged ship is, to a great degree, a copy of the X-37B spaceplane flown . The photo was taken by a commercial imaging satellite owned by a company called Vantor, known as Maxar in 2024. Vantor is one of several companies that provide reconnaissance imagery of locations around the world to the US military and US intelligence agencies. The same Earth-imaging satellites can point their telescopes at objects in space. Lower-resolution views of a Chinese spaceplane showing the vehicle’s general shape were publicly available before the DIA assessment. A US Space Force official revealed Maxar’s observation at a 2024 conference in South Korea, but the Pentagon did not release the full-resolution image to the public until Monday, when it appeared in an unclassified Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of threats to the United States in space. Catch and release The DIA report doesn’t reveal much new about what the Chinese spaceplane does in orbit. China has launched four spaceplane missions since 2020 with durations of up to nine months. The fourth mission is in orbit today after launching in February. It is not publicly known whether China has one or more such spaceplanes in its inventory. The Space Force has two X-37Bs flying in rotation, with the longest of their eight missions to date running two-and-a-half years from launch until landing. US officials have released photos of the X-37B vehicles, published information about their design and dimensions, and disclosed a handful of experiments they have carried into orbit. Most of the X-37B’s activities in space are classified. Like the X-37B, China’s spaceplane lifts off inside the payload shroud of a conventional rocket, then operates as a satellite once in orbit. The spaceplane flies like a miniature unpiloted version of NASA’s Space Shuttle and reenters the atmosphere for an autonomous land runway landing at the end of each mission. Ground teams then refurbish it for another flight.