China's secretive spaceplane has been photographed in orbit by a commercial American satellite, and the Pentagon has now released the image — a detail buried in an unclassified Defense Intelligence Agency assessment published on Monday.
The picture was taken in 2024 by an imaging satellite owned by Vantor, then known as Maxar. It shows a winged vehicle with delta wings, payload bay doors, a dark heat shield and a rear-mounted service module carrying solar arrays. It looks, to a first approximation, like the US Space Force's X-37B, which is nine metres long — about a quarter of a space shuttle orbiter. A Space Force official mentioned the observation at a 2024 conference in South Korea; the full-resolution image stayed under wraps until this week.
Even the name is unsettled. Western publications call the vehicle Shenlong, after 2000s reporting on a Chinese robotic spaceplane programme. Chinese state media refer to it only as Chongfu Shiyong Shiyan Hangtian Qi, or CSSHQ — "reusable experimental spacecraft".
What it has been doing is better documented than what it is for. China has flown four missions since 2020, the longest lasting around nine months. The fourth launched in February and is still in orbit. According to orbital tracking analysed by the astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, the vehicle released a subsatellite in June and recaptured it in July, then repeated the cycle in August and September — the clearest sign yet of rendezvous and capture, possibly using a robotic arm.
The DIA writes that the "enhanced maneuverability" of spaceplanes makes them "more suitable for certain missions than traditional satellites". For comparison, one X-37B flight climbed beyond 24,000 miles in altitude and used aerobraking to set up reentry, while the Chinese vehicle has stayed in low-Earth orbit, a few hundred miles up.
The more consequential part of the report is not the photograph but the assessment of counterspace weapons. China "has multiple ground-based laser weapons with varying power levels to disrupt, degrade, or damage satellites in LEO", it says, and "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".
The image also illustrates a second shift: non-Earth imaging. Commercial Earth-observation satellites can be pointed at objects in space when orbits intersect, producing snapshots of other nations' spacecraft at very high relative speed. Vantor is one of several firms supplying imagery to the US military and intelligence agencies, which turns inspection of classified or proprietary hardware into a commercial service — with the espionage implications that follow.
The context is dense. Russia's Kosmos 2612 manoeuvred close to a US-registered radar imaging satellite this month. Nivelir, a Russian system designed to fire projectiles from one satellite at another, was simulated in 2020; in April Russia launched small satellites near an ICEYE radar satellite that supplies imagery to Ukraine, one closing to "tens of meters". Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said last month that the Pentagon has fielded weapons in space — the first such acknowledgement by any government. US intelligence says Russia aims to deploy a nuclear weapon in orbit. China refuelled a satellite in geostationary orbit last year, something no other country has managed above low-Earth orbit, and operates TJS inspector satellites that routinely approach foreign spacecraft.
The takeaway: the orbital domain is becoming observable, contestable and crowded — and that a commercial camera caught the spaceplane is as much the story as the spaceplane itself.
