The Chinese media reported that the spacecraft was launched last August from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China on a Long March 2F rocket, which China used to launch its Shenzhou crewed space missions. Like the X-37B, the Chinese vehicle seems to be fairly small. Some other reusable spacecraft, such as SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, are modules attached to launch rockets that rely on parachutes to land.
McDowell says satellite sensing shows the spacecraft gliding and performing a runway landing at the Lop Nur military base in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, suggesting that it is a plane.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in Boston, Massachusetts, agrees that China’s experimental spacecraft could be a nod to Boeing’s X-37B spaceplane. The purpose of X-37B is unknown, but he says the Chinese government was concerned about the craft’s military capacities when it was revealed in 2010. The spacecraft is likely to be similar to a US spaceplane, the Boeing X-37B, according to Kevin Pollpeter, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, a US government-funded research and analysis organization in Arlington, Virginia. In September 2020, China returned a reusable experimental spacecraft that had spent two days in orbit. The nine-month mission is probably a second test of the reusable spacecraft. Although the upfront costs are high, the costs of running reusable craft are a fraction of those for single-use craft, making reusable spacecraft attractive if a mission requires several flights. “The complete success of this experiment marks a significant breakthrough in our country’s research on reusable spacecraft technology,” Chinese state media agency Xinhua reported, suggesting that Chinese researchers have developed technology, such as heat shields and landing equipment, specifically for reusable craft.Ĭhina, the US companies Boeing and SpaceX and NASA are the only players to have launched and recovered orbiting reusable craft. Although China has not revealed details about the spacecraft’s design and operation, aerospace engineers have pieced together information from fragments, painting a picture of a craft with potential for research as well as military uses. Credit: Boeing/Sipa/ShutterstockĬhina has landed a mysterious spacecraft that spent nine months in Earth’s orbit, making the nation one of just a handful of entities that have successfully operated a reusable spacecraft. See the example below or follow along at home with the demo.The Boeing X-37B, pictured here, is thought to have inspired China’s mysterious spaceplane. Without doing anything, the default white-space value is normal, and the text will wrap. At a reasonable font size, that’s too much text to fit in 100px. You’ve styled the div to have a set width of 100px. Let’s say you have HTML exactly like this:
The CSS white-space property controls how text is handled on the element it is applied to.
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