Space & Astronomy

By T.K. Randall
June 28, 2026

Image Credit: NASA

China has deployed an unidentified payload in orbit around the Earth using its secretive Shenlong space plane.

Officially part of China's efforts to develop reusable spaceflight technologies, the space plane (known as Shenlong) has long remained something of an enigma.

In reality, it is likely to perform a similar role to the X-37b - a secretive space plane originally developed by NASA before being handed over to the US Department of Defense which has itself conducted numerous secretive missions into space lasting up to several years at a time.

Shenlong's latest mission launched on February 6th of this year, though as usual full details of its objectives and operations have been kept a closely guarded secret.

What we do know, however, is that on June 22nd, Shenlong deployed some sort of object into orbit.

This observation came courtesy of commercial orbital intelligence company LeoLabs.

"At 02:30 UTC on 22 June 2026, LeoLabs detected an unknown object in the vicinity of the Chinese Shenlong reusable space plane," the firm wrote on social media.

"This object did not correlate to any other object in our catalog. It was first observed by our Tracker radar in New Zealand."

While Shenlong has been known to deploy objects in orbit before, that doesn't do much to explain what this one (or any of the previous ones) might be doing.

As usual, China's goals in Earth's orbit continue to remain a bit of a mystery.

Source: Space.com

Tags: China