China’s Spaceplane Returns After 276 Days
China’s uncrewed reusable spaceplane, thought to be similar to the U.S. X-37B, has returned to Earth after 276 days in space. Both China and the United States are highly secretive about what these spacecraft do while they are in space, but lengthy mission durations seem to be part of the plan.
China’s CGTN confirmed the spaceplane’s return late last night EDT. Launched on August 5, 2022 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert, CGTN said the “test’s success marks an important breakthrough in reusable spacecraft technology research and provides technological support for the peaceful use of space.”
The first flight was in 2020 and landed just two days later, so this was a significant step forward in duration.
Expert amateurs who closely track satellites using Two Line Element (TLE) data from the U.S. Space Force’s public Space-Track.org database and other methods estimate this landing was about 00:20 UTC May 8 (8:20 pm EDT May 7) at Lop Nor.
Bob Christy (@OrbitalFocus) and Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) were among those tweeting the news.
Mission update
Chinese spaceplane
Landing
May 8, ~00:20 UTC
Lop NorThis time it’s real – for explanation of the map seehttps://t.co/k2WDCmLCSe
Times are probably ±3 minutes pic.twitter.com/CDgoM6TLsj
— Orbital Focus (@OrbitalFocus) May 8, 2023
Pass over Lop Nor shown here pic.twitter.com/9RG3KCIfRS
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) May 8, 2023
Todd Master of Umbra, which operates commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) microsatellites, tweeted images of the Lop Nor landing site before and after the estimated landing time.
Image above is from today, 8 May at 0321 UTC. Image below was 26 April, 0340 UTC (when everyone was first getting all excited about a potential landing). Definitely a different set of objects in front of the building today. pic.twitter.com/9a5RuIumcI
— Todd Master (@MasterActual) May 8, 2023
So, Chinese “X-37B” seems to have landed at Lop Nur just after midnight on May 8th (~00:20 UTC )
Per the SAR images of @umbraspace (via https://t.co/8k7NGALHed h/t @Harry__Stranger ) possible recover vehicles at the north end of the runway at Lop Nur at 2023-05-08 03:21 UTC https://t.co/edV93Ao6wa pic.twitter.com/YphsRRRiIV
— DutchSpace (@DutchSpace) May 8, 2023
The 276-day duration of China’s spaceplane is well short of the record of 908 days set by the U.S. X-37B in November 2022. The X-37B, built by Boeing, looks like a small space shuttle and started as a NASA effort to build a space taxi for the International Space Station. NASA terminated the program in 2004 and transferred it to DOD, which continued development as an uncrewed system. There are two flightworthy vehicles and they have made a total of six flights since 2010 accumulating over 10 years in space.
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