Iron curtain in orbit: China and the US in race for space supremacy

Also possible is that the shuttles are grappling machines which could sabotage or even steal satellites, by bumping into them, damaging them or seizing them and taking them home. Maybe that was what the Heavenly Dragon — Shenlong, in Chinese — was practising. “Special attention” was certainly being paid by experts to the two shuttles, wrote Juliana Suess, a space researcher for the Royal United Services Institute, the defence and security think tank. “This attention is due in part to the extreme secrecy in which both projects have been shrouded, which has in the past led to wild speculation as to their exact purpose and capabilities,” she said. It was probably no coincidence that the two shuttles were launched around the same time, last December, she and several other experts have concluded. “The great power competition between China and the US cannot often be seen in such a clear light as it is in the context of spaceplanes,” Suess added. “As we continue to see states’ ambitions and politics projected into space, the X-37B and Shenlong are the space ambitions of the US and China made manifest.”