The photo was taken in 2024, most likely during the spaceplane’s third orbital mission. Credit: DIA.For years, China’s experimental spaceplane has circled the Earth in near-total secrecy. Then, in 2024, a commercial satellite passed below it, aimed its camera into the dark, and snapped a crisp photograph of the mysterious craft’s underside.
The Defense Intelligence Agency has now released the image on page 53 of its 130-page Challenges to Security in Space report, giving the public its first clear view of the vehicle in orbit. Taken by the intelligence firm Maxar Technologies — now called Vantor — the photo exposes Beijing’s push to master reusable, maneuvering spacecraft.
The vehicle has released small objects into space and, apparently, retrieved them. Until now, the public had only hazy views of what it looked like.
What immediately stands out is the Chinese design’s strong resemblance to the U.S. military’s X-37B, another uncrewed spaceplane whose missions are largely classified.
A Secret Shuttle With a Mysterious Job
How does a satellite designed to photograph rivers and cities capture a speeding spacecraft? Operators use a technique called “non-Earth imaging,” tilting their telescopes upward as two orbits cross at over 17,000 miles per hour. In the resulting image, the craft’s design jumps out immediately. Built by the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, the unpiloted plane features delta wings, a dark heat shield for atmospheric reentry, central payload bay doors, twin vertical tails, and a rear module unfolding two solar arrays.
Western observers call the craft Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” while Chinese state media refer to it simply as Chongfu Shiyong Shiyan Hangtian Qi (CSSHQ) — which literally means reusable experimental spacecraft. If the silhouette looks familiar, it is because the plane closely mirrors the U.S. Space Force’s Boeing-built X-37B. Both vehicles launch vertically inside a rocket shroud, spend months or years circling the globe, and glide back to a runway landing like miniature, robotic versions of NASA’s Space Shuttle.
While the 29-foot-long X-37B has ventured more than 24,000 miles out and completed a two-and-a-half-year trek across eight classified missions (including a current flight surpassing 431 days that tests laser communications and quantum sensors), China’s spaceplane has stayed a few hundred miles up across four flights since 2020.
The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-6 (OTV-6), the U.S. Space Force’s unmanned, reusable spaceplane, successfully deorbited and landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility on Nov. 12, 2022, at 05:22 a.m. Credit: Space News.A High-Speed Game of Catch and Release
Why build a winged spaceplane when conventional satellites cost less to launch and have been around for decades? The DIA noted in its report that the “enhanced maneuverability” of spaceplanes makes them “more suitable for certain missions than traditional satellites.”
After a two-day maiden flight in 2020 and marathons of 276 days in 2022 and 268 days in 2023, the Chinese vehicle launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on February 7, 2026, for its fourth mission. During the 2023 flight, the DIA reported that the spaceplane “released and interacted with an object.” On its current flight, open-source tracking analyzed by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell shows the plane released a sub-satellite in June, recaptured it in July — possibly with a robotic arm — and repeated the feat in August and September.
Being able to approach and grab another object in orbit takes exceptionally precise navigation. It could help engineers repair satellites, remove dangerous debris, or test new hardware. It could also allow a military spacecraft to interfere with someone else’s satellite.
“The Chinese have a lot of interest in rendezvous and proximity operations,” Victoria Samson, a space-security expert at the Secure World Foundation, told Supercluster. “These could be used either as weapons or counterspace capabilities, but they can also have other, completely non-aggressive reasons, too.”
In separate defense assessments, analysts note that the DIA sees laser weapons, or directed-energy weapons (DEWs), as China’s favored tool for blinding enemy sensors. The intelligence agency reported that Beijing likely views DEWs as “ideal counterspace systems” for disabling orbital hardware.
“China has multiple ground-based laser weapons with varying power levels to disrupt, degrade, or damage satellites in LEO,” the DIA said. “By the late 2020s, China may field space-based directed energy systems and higher-powered ground-based directed energy systems capable of threatening satellites in higher orbits.”
Meanwhile, Russia is developing nuclear space capabilities and its projectile-firing Nivelir system, and maneuvered a satellite within “tens of meters” of a commercial radar craft serving Ukraine, US officials said. The United States has also acknowledged fielding orbital weapons and inspector satellites. Yet as commercial cameras keep watching from above, even the stealthiest machines in this orbital chess match are finding it harder to stay in the shadows.
