Space

China’s Secret Spaceplane: Inside the Shenlong Mystery

✍ Arvind 📅 November 1, 2026 ⏱ 30 min

In December 2023, just days after China launched its secret spaceplane for the third time, the people who track satellites for a hobby noticed something odd. Six new objects had appeared in orbit around it. Six. Nobody had announced them. Nobody knew what they were. One tracker started calling them “mysterious wingmen,” and the name stuck.

Almost three years later, at the end of October 2026, a United States intelligence agency published a 130-page report on threats in space. Tucked away on page 53 is a single photograph. It is the clearest picture the public has ever seen of that spaceplane, floating in orbit with its cargo doors open and something attached to its tail.

China has never shown this spacecraft to anyone. It has never released a photo, a diagram, a size, a purpose or even a name beyond a bland bureaucratic description. So this investigation starts with four questions. What is this thing actually doing up there? How many objects has it really let go? What happened to those six wingmen? And the strangest one of all: where does it actually land? Because the official answer and the trackers’ answer do not match, and one of the places named is where China used to explode its nuclear weapons.

Let’s play detective. By the end, you will know more about this spacecraft than most people on Earth, and you will also see exactly where the trail goes cold.

A spacecraft with no official name

In the West, it is called Shenlong, which means “Divine Dragon.” That name traces back to a 2007 set of images that appeared online showing a small winged test article slung beneath a Chinese H-6 bomber, part of a program reportedly code-named 863-706. China has never confirmed that the vehicle flying today is the same project, and it has never used the name Shenlong for it. Chinese state media only ever calls it a “reusable experimental spacecraft.”

Here is what we can piece together about how it works. The spaceplane rides into orbit tucked inside the nose fairing of a Long March 2F rocket. That detail matters. The Long March 2F is the same rocket family China uses to send its astronauts to the Tiangong space station, which means it is one of the most trusted rockets in the Chinese fleet. Every spaceplane launch so far has lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

Once in orbit, the spaceplane behaves like a satellite. It circles Earth roughly every 90 minutes at a speed of about 28,000 kilometers per hour. When its mission is over, it fires its engine to slow down, plunges back through the atmosphere protected by a dark heat shield, and glides to a landing on a runway. No pilot. No crew. Everything is done by computer.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is essentially a small robotic version of NASA’s Space Shuttle, and it looks remarkably like America’s own secret spaceplane, the X-37B. We will come back to that comparison, because it holds one of the most important clues in this whole story.

Four missions in six years

The spaceplane has flown four times so far, and every mission has been longer and more ambitious than the one before.

The first mission launched on September 4, 2020, and lasted only about two days. It was a shakedown flight. Go up, prove the systems work, come home.

The second mission launched in early August 2022 and stayed in orbit for 276 days, a little over nine months, before landing on May 8, 2023. During this flight the spaceplane raised its orbit to a near-circular path around 600 kilometers above Earth.

The third mission launched on December 14, 2023, and landed on September 6, 2024, after roughly 266 days in space. This is the mission during which the now-famous photograph was taken.

The fourth mission launched on February 7, 2026, and as of this writing, it is still up there. Here is a detail worth noticing. If the spaceplane stays in orbit until around November 10, 2026, this flight will pass the 276-day record set by mission two, making it the longest flight of the program so far. Add up all four flights and the vehicle (or vehicles, since nobody outside China knows whether one airframe has flown every mission) has now spent well over 800 days in orbit.

The art of saying nothing

China’s official communication about all of this is almost comically brief. When the third mission came home in September 2024, Xinhua, China’s state news agency, published a single sentence. A reusable experimental spacecraft, it said, “successfully returned to its scheduled landing site.” That was the entire announcement.

The fourth launch in February 2026 got similar treatment. The launch center said the vehicle would be “verifying reusable spacecraft technologies” to support the peaceful use of space. No images of the liftoff were released. No mission length was given. No payload was described.

So if the country that built it says almost nothing, how do we know anything at all? The answer is one of the best stories in modern space science. A handful of people have been watching this vehicle since its very first day in orbit, and they have been doing it mostly with public data, home-built antennas and a lot of patience.

The detectives who never stopped watching

Go back to September 2020. The spaceplane goes up, spends two days in orbit and lands. Mission over. Except it is not quite over, because the United States Space Force runs a global network of radars and telescopes that catalogs every sizable object in orbit, and it publishes much of that catalog for anyone to use. After the spaceplane had gone home, that network noticed something new. A small object was still circling Earth in almost exactly the same orbit the spaceplane had been in.

Rewinding the orbits

Marco Langbroek, a Dutch satellite tracker and archaeologist who runs the SatTrackCam Leiden blog, took the orbital data and did something clever. He ran the orbits of the spaceplane and the mystery object backwards in time, the way you might rewind dashcam footage from two cars to find the exact moment they separated on a highway. The two paths converged. Based on that analysis, Langbroek concluded the object had been released about two orbits before the spaceplane came home.

That timing is significant. Space debris is usually shed at launch, when rocket stages and covers fall away. An object released near the end of a mission, right before landing, looks deliberate. The spaceplane had left something behind on purpose.

The object that talked

About eight days after the landing, on September 14, 2020, a Russian radio amateur named Dmitry Pashkov pointed his antenna at that leftover object and picked up a signal. The next day, Scott Tilley, a Canadian amateur astronomer famous for tracking down lost satellites by their radio chatter, recorded it too and confirmed the find.

Spanish engineer Daniel Estévez then analyzed Tilley’s recording in detail. The object, catalogued as 2020-063G, was broadcasting in the S-band around 2280 megahertz. The signal kept fading in and out every few minutes, with deep drops in strength, which Estévez linked to the object tumbling as it orbited. He found the transmission carried very little actual data, with most of its bits repeating the same pattern frame after frame. He could not work out what it was saying.

But here is the key point. Debris does not talk to you on the radio. A dead rocket cover does not broadcast a structured digital signal. Whatever the spaceplane left behind in 2020 was a working piece of hardware with a job to do.

The cataloguer

The third key figure is Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. For decades, McDowell has maintained one of the most detailed public catalogs of everything humanity has launched into space, now called the General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects, or GCAT. Every object, every launch, every reentry, annotated by hand and updated constantly.

Most of what the world knows about China’s spaceplane comes from people like these three, combined with Space Force tracking data and, more recently, commercial radar networks like LeoLabs. They compare notes in public, correct each other in public and build the picture one orbit at a time. Which brings us to the first big question.

How many objects has it actually released?

If you read the news coverage from late October 2026, you will find numbers all over the place. Some articles say the spaceplane has deployed “at least nine” unidentified objects. Earlier reporting on mission three alone talked about six or seven. So which is it?

For this investigation, we went through McDowell’s catalog object by object, across all four missions. The picture that emerges is much smaller and much more interesting than the headlines. Trackers have logged four objects that the spaceplane appears to have deliberately released: one in 2020, and then one each on missions two, three and four. Four. The bigger numbers come from lumping in every object seen near the spaceplane, and as we will see, many of those turned out to be something far less exciting.

But counting releases misses the real story. The interesting part is what happened after each release.

Mission two: flying in formation

Near the end of October 2022, about three months into the second mission, a new object appeared next to the spaceplane. McDowell listed it simply as “Subsatellite 1.” Then things got strange.

According to the new report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency, called Challenges to Security in Space 2026, in November 2022 the spaceplane “appeared to maneuver with a companion satellite and conduct station-keeping at around 1 km separation.” Station-keeping means holding a fixed position relative to something else. In plain terms, the spaceplane was flying in formation with its little companion, a little over half a mile away, while both were hurtling around Earth at orbital speed.

The report goes further. “At one point, the two objects appeared within 100 meters of one another.” That is about the length of a football field. And then comes the most important sentence: “The spaceplane and satellite possibly rendezvoused before the satellite was re-released.”

Pay close attention to that word, possibly. This is a US military intelligence agency with access to classified tracking data, and even it is not saying for certain. It is saying the data is consistent with the two objects meeting, and then the small satellite being let go a second time. Space.com has also reported that the subsatellite from the second mission is thought to have had its own propulsion, which would make it capable of maneuvering on its own rather than simply drifting.

Mission three: released and interacted

The DIA report says less about the third mission, but what it says is telling. During that flight, according to the report, the spaceplane “released and interacted with an object.” Again, no detail on what “interacted” means. But keep that phrase in mind, because the photograph we are about to examine was taken during this exact mission.

Mission four: catch, release, chase, catch

Now jump to the mission happening right now. This is where the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

At 02:30 UTC on June 22, 2026, the commercial radar company LeoLabs detected an unknown object near the spaceplane using its tracking radar in New Zealand. The object did not match anything in its catalog. LeoLabs said it had assessed “with high confidence” that the object “was released from the Chinese space plane,” and added that the activity was “consistent with sub-satellite deployments conducted by the space plane in previous missions.” The Space Force catalogued the object shortly after.

Then the story takes a turn. According to McDowell’s timeline, built from Space Force tracking data, the small satellite was released around June 21, 2026. About three weeks later, around July 12, the spaceplane appears to have caught it again. In late August, it released the same satellite a second time and drifted several thousand kilometers away from it. Then it came all the way back, began closing in around September 10, and on September 13 it appears to have caught it again.

So here is the tally across the whole program. Four objects released. At least two caught back. One of them caught twice.

McDowell’s catalog even carries a small status code next to some of these objects. It essentially means grappled, as in grabbed and held by the spaceplane. He has suggested the spaceplane probably uses a robotic arm to do the catching, which would make sense of the data. But that is his interpretation of orbital tracks. Nobody outside the program has actually seen an arm.

Which raises the obvious question. Why would anyone go to the trouble of letting a satellite go, only to chase it down across thousands of kilometers and catch it again? Hold onto that question. The answer starts to come into focus once you look at the photo.

What does the new photo actually show?

The image on page 53 of the DIA report was taken on May 28, 2024, during the third mission. It was not captured by a spy satellite or a ground telescope. It was taken by WorldView-3, a commercial Earth-observation satellite owned by the company Vantor, which until recently was known as Maxar Technologies.

Looking up instead of down

WorldView-3 normally spends its life pointing down, photographing cities, farmland and military bases for paying customers. For this shot, it did something called non-Earth imaging. The satellite turned its telescope toward another spacecraft as their orbits crossed, and snapped the Chinese spaceplane from just under 90 kilometers away, about 56 miles. Remember that both spacecraft were moving at roughly 28,000 kilometers per hour. Getting a sharp image under those conditions is a remarkable feat of timing and pointing.

According to Space.com, the image resolves details down to about 4.5 centimeters per pixel, roughly the width of a golf ball. That is extraordinarily sharp for a picture of one spacecraft taken from another.

A passenger on the tail

Vantor’s own description of the image is short but striking. The company said: “The spacecraft’s payload bay doors are visibly open.” And it added: “There is a separate satellite docked to the aft section of the vehicle whose structure and solar arrays are visible.”

Aft simply means the back. So at the exact moment this picture was taken, the spaceplane was holding onto something at its tail.

There is an important debate about what that something is. The War Zone and other outlets describe the visible features as small wings, twin vertical tails, upward-opening payload bay doors and a tail extension with deployed solar panels. Some analysts read that tail structure as a service module, a detachable unit that provides power and propulsion during the mission and is discarded before reentry, similar to a design used on the X-37B’s later flights. Vantor, which owns the image, calls it a separate docked satellite. Both readings are possible, and neither China nor the DIA has said which is correct. What the DIA does confirm is the third mission “released and interacted with an object.” The photo may be our first look at what interacting looks like.

Not quite the first look

Here is a detail that most coverage missed. According to The War Zone, a lower-resolution version of this same image was shown publicly back in 2024. Colonel John Patrick, then commander of US Space Forces Korea, included it in a presentation at the Open Space Forum in South Korea. It went largely unnoticed. Amateur astronomers had also captured blurry ground-based images of the spaceplane in mid-2024 showing what looked like solar panels or antennas. But nothing came close to the sharpness of the version now in the DIA report.

The War Zone also pointed out one notable difference from the X-37B. The Chinese wings appear to have a much longer chord, meaning they are deeper from front to back. That is a hint that the two vehicles, while similar in concept, were designed independently with different aerodynamic priorities.

And what is docked to its tail? Nobody is saying, so we genuinely do not know. But this is not the only thing about this spacecraft that refuses to add up. The strangest mystery is still ahead.

Everyone has been asking the wrong question

Most headlines about this spaceplane ask some version of “What is it dropping?” That framing makes it sound like a bomber scattering mystery packages. But after following the evidence, the more interesting question is the opposite. What does it keep picking back up?

To understand why that matters, it helps to know that this spaceplane has a family tree. And that family tree is full of secrets, rivalries and one of the best espionage stories in the history of spaceflight.

The spaceplane that never flew

In the late 1950s, the US Air Force began developing a small, piloted, winged spacecraft called the X-20 Dyna-Soar, short for “dynamic soaring.” The idea was a military spaceplane that could fly into orbit on top of a rocket and glide back to a runway landing. Astronauts were selected. Mockups were built. And then, on December 10, 1963, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara canceled it. In the same decision, he handed the Air Force a different project, a crewed military space station called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Dyna-Soar never flew, but the dream of a reusable military spaceplane never died.

The Soviet giant that flew once

The Soviet Union built its own answer to NASA’s Space Shuttle, a giant orbiter called Buran, meaning “snowstorm.” It flew exactly once, on November 15, 1988, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on top of the enormous Energia rocket. There was nobody on board. Buran circled Earth twice and then landed itself, entirely by computer, after a flight of about three and a half hours. It was a stunning technical achievement, and then the Soviet Union collapsed and the program was abandoned. The orbiter that flew was later destroyed when its hangar roof collapsed in 2002.

The spy photos that built an American spaceplane

This is the best part. In the early 1980s, the Soviets were also secretly testing a much smaller spaceplane called BOR-4. It was a subscale, uncrewed test vehicle, launched into orbit and then splashed down in the ocean to be recovered by ship. The Soviets disguised these flights under the generic “Kosmos” satellite name.

On March 16, 1983, after one of these flights, a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion patrol aircraft flew over a Soviet ship recovering the craft near the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Australian crew took photographs. Those were the first Western images of the secret vehicle.

The photos made their way to NASA. Engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center reverse-engineered the BOR-4’s shape from the pictures, built scale models and tested them in wind tunnels. The result was a NASA design called the HL-20, studied between 1989 and 1993. The HL-20 never flew either, but in 2006 its design was licensed to a private company as the basis for a commercial spaceplane called Dream Chaser, which Sierra Nevada Corporation (now through its spinoff Sierra Space) has been developing ever since.

Think about that for a moment. A secret Soviet spaceplane, photographed by a rival nation’s patrol aircraft, ended up shaping the design of an American spaceplane decades later. A secret vehicle, photographed from outside, its secrets leaking out through a single picture. Sound familiar?

Why catching is the hard part

Now back to the question of catching. Letting go of a satellite in orbit is easy. You open the bay doors and give it a gentle push. Finding a small object in orbit, matching its speed exactly, sliding up next to it and grabbing it without crashing into it is one of the hardest things you can do in space.

Here is an analogy. Imagine two cars on a highway, both doing hundreds of kilometers per hour. One driver pulls up beside the other, matches speed perfectly, and reaches through the window to take something from the other car, without either vehicle touching. Now imagine doing that while both cars are also slowly drifting up and down, and the laws of physics mean that speeding up actually pushes you into a higher, slower lane. That is orbital mechanics. It is deeply counterintuitive, and it is why the first attempts at docking in space, back in the 1960s, were so dramatic.

Experts call this skill rendezvous and proximity operations, often shortened to RPO. And it is the same basic capability you would need to refuel a satellite, repair one, upgrade one, inspect one, move one to a different orbit or clean up a piece of space junk.

Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that tracks space security, has said that rendezvous and proximity operations are a priority for China, Russia and the United States alike. She points out that the same skills could be used for refueling, refurbishing, upgrading and deorbiting satellites, or for tampering with an adversary’s spacecraft. In its analysis of the fourth mission, the Secure World Foundation wrote that “Shenlong has conducted numerous close maneuvers and capture/ docking operations with the deployed satellites.”

Seen in that light, the release and recapture pattern starts to make sense. If you want to master rendezvous and docking, you need a target to practice on. The safest, most controllable target is one you built yourself and released yourself. Let it go, drift away, come back, find it, grab it. Repeat, each time from farther away. On mission four, the spaceplane appears to have pushed the separation distance out to several thousand kilometers before coming back for its partner. That looks a lot like a training curriculum with the difficulty dial being turned up.

China’s wider practice in orbit

The spaceplane is not China’s only spacecraft practicing this skill. In early 2022, trackers observed a Chinese satellite called Shijian-21 grab a dead BeiDou navigation satellite in geostationary orbit, some 36,000 kilometers up, and tow it into a higher “graveyard” orbit before letting it go. In mid-2025, another satellite, Shijian-25, was observed apparently docking with Shijian-21 in geostationary orbit, in what many analysts believe was an in-orbit refueling test. China has not released details of either. Put together, these missions show a country systematically building the ability to approach, capture and service other spacecraft.

So is it a weapon?

This is the question everybody wants answered, so let’s be precise about what the evidence does and does not show.

There is no public evidence that the spaceplane is a weapon. The DIA report does not call it one. Its description is more measured: the agency says spaceplanes are reusable and “feature enhanced maneuverability, making them more suitable for certain missions” than traditional satellites. And as far as anyone outside the program has seen, every object the spaceplane has caught was its own.

The DIA report does contain plenty of alarming material about China’s space program more broadly. It says China “has developed and will continue to advance weapons for use against satellites in orbit,” and that China has multiple ground-based laser weapons that can “disrupt, degrade, or damage satellites” in low Earth orbit. But those statements are about China’s overall counterspace program, not about the spaceplane specifically. Blurring the two would be a mistake.

The honest summary is this. The spaceplane is clearly practicing skills that have both peaceful and military uses. That is what makes it worth watching. As Samson has argued, more transparency from both China and the US would help, because when governments say nothing, “people tend to just imagine the worst-case scenario.”

America’s mirror image

Which brings us to the X-37B, the American spacecraft that China’s spaceplane resembles so closely. Built by Boeing and now flown by the US Space Force, the X-37B is about 29 feet long, or 8.8 meters, roughly a quarter the length of the Space Shuttle orbiter. Two of them exist. Since its first launch in April 2010, the X-37B has flown eight missions.

Its seventh mission launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy into a highly elliptical orbit, swinging far beyond the low orbits it had used before. After more than 434 days in space, it landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on March 7, 2025. Along the way, it demonstrated a technique called aerobraking: dipping repeatedly into the thin upper atmosphere so that air drag slows it down and lowers its orbit, saving a great deal of fuel.

Its eighth mission launched on August 21, 2025, on a SpaceX Falcon 9, and it has been in orbit for more than 14 months. According to the Space Force, it is testing high-speed laser communication links between satellites and what the Space Force calls the highest-performing quantum inertial sensor ever flown in space. That sensor could help spacecraft navigate without relying on GPS, which matters a great deal if GPS signals are ever jammed or unavailable.

Most of what the X-37B does is classified too, so this is not a story of an open American program versus a secret Chinese one. Both are secretive. But here is the crucial difference that the Secure World Foundation highlights: the X-37B “has never approached or rendezvoused with any other known space object.” China’s spaceplane has done it again and again.

Interestingly, the US has hinted that it is thinking along similar lines. In 2023, the Space Force released an official painting showing an X-37B-like spaceplane intercepting another satellite. Whether that was a statement of intent or simply artwork, nobody has said.

Not one Chinese spaceplane, but several

The DIA report adds one more wrinkle. It states that “China has two primary spaceplane models: the Shenlong and Tengyun.” Tengyun, unveiled by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation in 2016, is a different concept: a two-stage system designed to take off more like an aircraft. As far as public information goes, Tengyun has not yet flown to orbit, and most experts believe the photographed vehicle is the one the West calls Shenlong. Another proposed design, sometimes called Haolong, has been pitched as a small cargo spaceplane for resupplying the Tiangong space station. China is clearly not betting on just one vehicle.

That leaves two questions. What happened to those six wingmen? And where does this thing actually land?

What were the six wingmen?

Remember the six mysterious objects from the start of this story? Let’s resolve that one, because it is a wonderful example of how science is supposed to work.

In December 2023, just days after the third mission launched, trackers spotted six objects in orbit near the spaceplane, designated OBJECT A through OBJECT F. Scott Tilley, the same Canadian amateur who had confirmed the radio signal back in 2020, called them “mysterious wingmen.” And he had reason to be excited. Near some of them, he picked up radio signals. OBJECT A appeared to emit signals reminiscent of earlier spaceplane companions, carrying a small amount of data. OBJECTS D and E appeared to emit idle “placeholder” signals with no data at all. Tilley noted the modulation was something he had previously seen only from Chinese spaceplane missions using a frequency of 2280 megahertz.

It looked like the spaceplane had deployed a whole squadron. The internet ran with it.

Then, a few months later, Tilley corrected himself publicly. Further analysis showed that the signals were not coming from those objects at all. They were being transmitted by other Chinese military satellites in the same region of the sky. As Tilley put it on X: “What we discovered is China is using 2280MHz for a number of military missions at low inclinations.” Space.com added an editor’s note to its original story in June 2024 explaining that the objects surrounding the spaceplane “were not released by the spacecraft itself” and were inert debris.

And when you look those objects up in McDowell’s catalog today, four of them carry a very ordinary label: “sep motor covers.” These are protective covers that pop off the rocket’s separation motors during launch. In other words, rocket wrappers. And it turns out each spaceplane launch sheds four of them.

There is something wonderful about this. The person who raised the mystery was also the person who solved it, and he did it in public. That is exactly how good science works. And it is also why this investigation counts four deliberately released objects, not nine. A lot of the bigger numbers are built on the wingmen and similar launch debris.

Three questions answered. One left, and it is the one we have been saving.

Where does it actually land?

On May 8, 2023, the second mission came home after 276 days in orbit. Xinhua announced that the spacecraft had successfully returned to its “scheduled landing site at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.”

That seems clear enough. Jiuquan is where the spaceplane launches. It would make sense for it to land there too.

But Jonathan McDowell’s catalog says something different. It lists all three completed landings at Lop Nur, a remote runway in the desert of Xinjiang in northwest China, far from the Jiuquan launch pads. Trackers including Langbroek and McDowell first identified the Lop Nur airbase as the likely landing site after the very first flight in 2020, working from the spaceplane’s final orbital track and where that track would bring it down.

The runway there is enormous. The War Zone describes the secretive airbase in northwest China where the spaceplane appears to land as having a runway around 16,400 feet long, about 5 kilometers. For comparison, the Shuttle Landing Facility that NASA built at Kennedy Space Center for the Space Shuttle was 15,000 feet. A runway that long, in the middle of nowhere, is exactly what you would want for landing an unpowered glider coming in from orbit at high speed.

A place with a history

And Lop Nur has a history. It is where China tested its nuclear weapons. China’s first nuclear test took place there on October 16, 1964, and the country carried out 45 nuclear tests in total before its final test in 1996.

Now, it is essential to be absolutely clear about this. There is no public evidence that this spaceplane has anything to do with nuclear weapons. None. What we have is two sources that disagree about where a spacecraft touched down, and one of the places named happens to be a former nuclear test site. Large, remote, heavily restricted military areas tend to get reused for other sensitive programs. That is all the connection we can responsibly make.

The radar witness

There is one more clue. On May 8, 2023, the same day the second mission came home, a radar satellite company called Umbra imaged the Lop Nur runway. The picture was taken a few hours after the landing time listed in McDowell’s catalog. Umbra released the image under an open Creative Commons license, making it free for anyone to study.

Radar satellites are especially useful for this kind of detective work. Unlike optical cameras, they can see through clouds and at night, building up an image from microwave echoes. They show the runway, the surrounding infrastructure and anything large parked on the surface.

So who is right?

There may be a simple explanation for the mismatch, and it is worth offering with appropriate caution. The Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center is not just a launch pad. It is a large military organization that oversees operations across a huge swath of China’s northwest, and the launch site itself does not even sit in the city of Jiuquan, but hundreds of kilometers away in Inner Mongolia. It is possible that when Xinhua says the spaceplane landed “at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center,” it means a facility run by the center, rather than the launch complex itself. That would allow both accounts to be partly true.

But that is an explanation, not evidence. China has never published the landing coordinates, and nobody outside the program has published a photo of the spaceplane on the ground. So which one is right? Nobody outside the program knows for sure.

Can anything stay secret in orbit anymore?

Let’s zoom out and look at what this whole story reveals.

A powerful country can keep a spacecraft secret for six years. It can launch it four times, never show a single picture, never give its dimensions and never even use the nickname the rest of the world calls it. And still, a Russian radio amateur hears its leftover satellite. A Canadian hobbyist confirms the signal. A Spanish engineer decodes its structure. A Dutch archaeologist rewinds its orbits. A Harvard astrophysicist logs every object it releases and catches. A commercial radar in New Zealand spots it letting go of a satellite. A radar satellite photographs its runway. And a commercial camera in orbit snaps it from 90 kilometers away, so sharply you can see its doors standing open.

In orbit, it turns out, you really cannot hide anymore. The sky is watched by too many eyes, many of them belonging to private companies and passionate amateurs who share what they find.

On the ground, though, it is a different story. After six years and four missions, we still cannot say for certain where this spaceplane lands, what it carries, what it caught in that photo, or who is directing it to do what. Secrets that leave the atmosphere become visible. Secrets that stay on the ground remain locked away.

The question nobody can answer yet

As this article is published, the fourth mission is still in orbit, closing in on the program’s endurance record. Sooner or later it will come home, and when it does, Xinhua will probably publish another single sentence. The trackers will rewind its orbit, check where its final pass leads, and look for fresh radar images of a long desert runway.

But here is the question we cannot stop thinking about. If a spaceplane can let a satellite go, chase it across thousands of kilometers, and catch it again, twice, then what would stop it from grabbing someone else’s satellite? Would we even know it had happened? Would the owner announce it? And if a camera somewhere did capture the moment, would anyone ever show us the picture?

Tell us what you think in the comments. And if you want to dig into the original evidence yourself, every primary source we used is listed below.

Sources

China Chinese space program classified space missions Satellite Imagery satellite servicing technology Shenlong spaceplane space security X-37B spaceplane

Astronomers found a real “Three-Body” star system 7,000 light-years away

Arvind4 min →

Did Viking 2 feel a marsquake in 1976? A new look at old data

Arvind3 min →

NASA Calls Mars ‘Leopard Spots’ a Potential Biosignature

Arvind1 min →

China’s Secret Spaceplane: Inside the Shenlong Mystery