The Chinese reusable experimental spacecraft ( zh, c=可重复使用试验航天器, p=Kě chóngfù shǐyòng shìyàn hángtiān qì, l=Reusable Experimental Spacecraft; CSSHQ) is the first Chinese

reusable spacecraft A reusable spacecraft is a class of spacecraft that have been designed with repeated launch, orbit, deorbit and atmospheric reentry in mind. This contrasts with conventional spacecraft which are designed to be expended (thrown away, allowed to bur ...

. It was first launched on 4 September 2020 at 07:30 UTC on a

Long March 2F The Long March 2F ( ''Changzheng 2F''), also known as the CZ-2F, LM-2F and Shenjian (, "Divine Arrow"), is a Chinese orbital carrier rocket, part of the Long March 2 rocket family. Designed to launch crewed Shenzhou spacecraft, the Long Mar ...

from the

Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center (JSLC; also known as Shuangchengzi Missile Test Center; Launch Complex B2; formally Northwest Comprehensive Missile Testing Facility (); Base 20; 63600 Unit) is a Chinese space vehicle launch facility (spac ...

, in the

Gobi Desert The Gobi Desert (Chinese: 戈壁 (沙漠), Mongolian: Говь (ᠭᠣᠪᠢ)) () is a large desert or brushland region in East Asia, and is the sixth largest desert in the world. Geography The Gobi measures from southwest to northeast an ...

northwestern China Northwest China () is a statistical region of China which includes the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Ningxia and the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Qinghai. It has an area of 3,107,900 km2. The region is characterized by a (semi-)arid con ...

Xinhua News Agency Xinhua News Agency (English pronunciation: )J. C. Wells: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd ed., for both British and American English, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua ...

said in a report, "After a period of in-orbit operation, the spacecraft will return to the scheduled landing site in China. It will test reusable technologies during its flight, providing technological support for the peaceful use of space". Unofficial reports indicate that the spacecraft is part of the

Shenlong Shenlong, (, literally "god dragon" or "divine dragon", Japanese: 神竜 Shinryū) is a spiritual dragon from Chinese mythology who is the master of storms and also a bringer of rain. He is of equal significance to other creatures such as Tianlon ...

spaceplane, which is claimed to be similar to the

Boeing X-37B The Boeing X-37, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), is a reusable robotic spacecraft. It is boosted into space by a launch vehicle, then re-enters Earth's atmosphere and lands as a spaceplane. The X-37 is operated by the United St ...

History

On 6 September 2020, two days after the launch, the CSSHQ successfully returned to an airbase. Marco Langbroek and Jonathan McDowell said the landing site was an airbase at

Lop Nur Lop Nur or Lop Nor (from a Mongolian name meaning "Lop Lake", where "Lop" is a toponym of unknown origin) is a former salt lake, now largely dried up, located in the eastern fringe of the Tarim Basin, between the Taklamakan and Kumtag deserts ...

. On 7 September 2020, commercial satellite reconnaissance company

Planet Labs Planet Labs PBC (formerly Planet Labs, Inc. and Cosmogia, Inc.) is an American public Earth imaging company based in San Francisco, California. Their goal is to image the entirety of the Earth daily to monitor changes and pinpoint trends. The co ...

published a satellite photo of a runway at

, taken shortly after the landing of the spaceplane. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, speculated that one of the dots visible on the runway is the Chinese spaceplane. On 8 September 2020, ''

Spaceflight Now Spaceflight (or space flight) is an application of astronautics to fly spacecraft into or through outer space, either with or without humans on board. Most spaceflight is uncrewed and conducted mainly with spacecraft such as satellites in o ...

'' reported American officials had detected the launch at 7:30

GMT Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon; as a cons ...

, that the craft's orbit's axes were and , and its orbit was titled 50.2 degrees to the equator.

2nd mission

On 4 August 2022 at around 16:00 UTC, the CSSHQ was launched for a second time, also on top of a

. It raised its orbit on August 25 to a near-circular 597 by 608-kilometer orbit.

Specifications

Chen Hongbo, of

China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, or CASC, is the main contractor for the Chinese space program. It is state-owned and has subsidiaries which design, develop and manufacture a range of spacecraft, launch vehicles, strategic ...

(CASC), the main contractor for China's space agency, said during a 2017 interview that China's space plane would be able to be re-used up to 20 times. Chen said the vehicle's first stage would use a

scramjet A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow. As in ramjets, a scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to compress the incoming air forcefully ...

engine. On 24 March 2020, officials said the vehicle was designed to carry a crew of six. Its takeoff weight would be 21.6 tonnes, and it would be long.

Speculation over the spaceplane's role

When asked to speculate on the spaceplane's role Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation said, "It's a great question. We're not even really sure why the U.S. military is pursuing a space plane." Jonathan McDowell speculated that the very high speeds the spaceplane underwent during re-entry might help the Chinese in their development of

hypersonic missile Hypersonic weapons are weapons travelling at hypersonic speed – at between 5 and 25 times the speed of sound, about . Below such speeds, weapons would be characterized as subsonic or supersonic, while above such speeds, the molecules of t ...

s. He added the Chinese may have thought, "If the Americans have one of those, there's got to be a good reason for it, so we better get one too."

References

{{Portal bar, China, Spaceflight Reusable spaceflight technology Space program of the People's Republic of China Spacecraft launched in 2020 Individual space vehicles Secret space vehicles