By Gerry Doyle
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China’s shadowy reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket and lands at a secret military airfield, is likely testing technology but could also be used to manipulate or retrieve satellites, experts say .
The spacecraft, on its third mission, was observed in June releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it.
“It obviously has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting enemy objects or disabling them,” said Marco Langbroek, professor of optical space situational awareness at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
“But it also has non-military applications. Gaining experience with this type of capture and release is good if you want to, for example… refuel your own satellites.”
As militaries around the world develop complex networks of satellites, a reusable spacecraft that can jam them could have immense value, Langbroek and three other experts said.
China has never disclosed what technologies the spacecraft tested, nor has the space plane been photographed publicly since it began operating.
The U.S. first launched its uncrewed Boeing X-37B space plane in 2010, while Russia recently launched several satellites that U.S. officials suspect could be weapons, an accusation Russia has denied.
China’s space plane is likely testing technology, much like the X-37B, said Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation thinktank in Washington, D.C.
“To be honest, I don’t think it has much military use,” Samson said. “I assume they’re both technology demonstrators.”
China’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. State media outlet Xinhua noted the launches and landings of the space plane, which it refers to as a “reusable test spacecraft.”
The Chinese space plane’s current flight began in December 2023. The previous mission, which also involved putting a separate object into space and retrieving it, launched in August 2022 and lasted 276 days, according to tracking data. Its first flight was in September 2020 and lasted two days.
“We see impressive advances by the People’s Republic of China in space,” said Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, noting that his organization did not know what objects the space plane had released.
“We assume that any space activity they undertake has some dual use in the national security domain,” Whiting said. “We’re always interested in understanding what that dual use could be and trying to make sure we have a good understanding of that.”
MYSTERY CRAFT
Little is known about China’s space plane.
Tracking data shows it launches from Jiuquan in north-central China and lands at an airfield in Lop Nur in the country’s Xinjiang region.
The airfield is connected to a site that was once used for nuclear testing and is tightly controlled by the military, said Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The data shows that it changed its altitude from ordinary orbits of about 350 km (217 miles) to 600 km and back again, he said.
It is believed to be approximately the same size and shape as the X-37B, which is around 9.14 m long and has spent up to 908 days in orbit at altitudes of up to 38,000 km.
Given that it spent months in space, it is assumed that China’s space plane is also uncrewed, even though it flew on China’s only human-rated booster, the Long March 2F.
The US space shuttle, which operated from 1981 to 2011, was about the size of a 737 commercial airliner and could carry a crew of seven, but spent no more than 17 days in orbit. The Soviet Union developed a large manned space plane called the Buran, which made an automated orbital flight, a 3-hour trip in 1988.
The space shuttle flew 10 classified missions in 135 flights, leading the Soviet Union to consider it a military spaceplane and develop the Buran, said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Proliferation.
“We don’t want to look at this (Chinese) space plane the same way the Soviets looked at the space shuttle,” he said. “Many of them are just experiments, not well-thought-out military platforms.”
MILITARY USES
The apparent in-orbit experiments with object release and recovery mirror those of the United States’ X-37B.
The X-37B missions have all been classified, but are described as taking experiments to space and back, and exploring “reusable vehicle technologies that support long-term space objectives,” according to Boeing.
The performance of these experiments can influence the duration of the mission. Testing a next-generation sensor, for example, could produce such useful information that the government might want to keep it in space longer before bringing it back to the lab, McDowell said.
Inspecting or disabling an adversary’s satellites is another potential military capability. Some countries, including the US, China, India and Russia, already have land-based anti-satellite missiles.
Orbital weapons have long been taboo and weapons of mass destruction in space are prohibited by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
In 2021, China tested a hypersonic glide vehicle as part of a Cold War-era concept known as the fractional orbital bombardment system, which launches a warhead partially into orbit, allowing it to attack with little warning from unusual trajectories.
But attacking from orbit using a space plane offers few advantages over ballistic missiles or cruise missiles, Lewis said.
Two senior Indian military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media, said that although the exact purpose of the Chinese space plane was unclear, India was concerned.
“The spacecraft in question is definitely alarming,” said one of the officials. “Things like this can always have dual purposes. India is watching closely.”
(This story has been refiled to remove image)
(Reporting by Gerry Doyle. Additional reporting by Joey Roulette, Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
