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AT LEAST you can still get a bit of privacy in orbit. If the American spaceplane X-37B really was spying on China’s Tiangong-1 spacelab, it didn’t hang around to snoop on the new occupants.
Operated by the US air force, the uncrewed spaceplane landed on 16 June after a record-breaking orbital flight of 469 days. Two days later China’s space agency celebrated the docking of its Shenzhou-9 spacecraft with Tiangong-1, delivering three crew, including China’s first woman in space, Liu Yang. They will spend their two-week mission conducting “scientific experiments and technical tests” – though compared with the International Space Station, Tiangong-1’s bare, padded interior looks devoid of instruments.
Not much is known about the spacelab’s purpose beyond its claimed role as a testbed for docking systems. That lack of knowledge fuelled speculation that the X-37B, which for a time had a similar orbit to Tiangong-1 and is similarly shrouded in mystery, was spying on the spacelab. Whatever the truth, the Boeing-built X-37B seems to be a triumph of spacecraft reusability. In December 2010, the first X-37B completed a 220-day mission. Now that has been more than doubled.
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That leaves China playing catch-up: the US and Russia docked with their own orbital space stations in the early 1970s – and even with each other in 1975.
