BEIJING: China’s first reusable spacecraft landed on Sunday after two days in orbit, a possible step toward lower mission cost for space flight, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
As details, the secretive, military-run space program has released few details about the craft, which was launched Friday aboard a Long March 2F rocket.
According to the official Xinhua News Agency, the craft was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s desert northwest.
The craft landed as planned at Jiuquan, State media have yet to release any photos. The craft’s size and shape are unclear.
The flight marks a significant breakthrough in our country’s research on reusable spacecraft that promises a more suitable and inexpensive way to reach space.
China sent its first astronaut into orbit in 2003 and had launched a space station.
In 2019, it became the first country to land a robot rover on the moon’s little-seen far side. A probe carrying another robot rover is en route to Mars.
Chinese social media has been rife with speculation over the spacecraft, which some commentators compared to the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B, an autonomous spaceplane made by Boeing that can remain in orbit for long periods of time before flying back to Earth on its own.
The United States and the former Soviet Union both flew reusable spacecraft. The US space shuttle flew 134 missions from the 1980s until 2011. Since then, the US military has developed the X-37, a robot glider that made its sixth flight in May.
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