If you thought the Chinese spy balloon was bad…
…You might want to be a skosh more worried about this:
China's Shenlong space plane caused intrigue this week after allegedly placing six unidentified objects into the Earth's orbit shortly after taking off on its third mission.
The objects, detectable by their signal, were identified by Canada-based satellite tracker and amateur astronomer Scott Tilley, who has been following the movements of the devices he has since labeled A through F.
Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley has been keeping track of the mysterious objects on X:
Tilley half-jokingly suggested at one point that the Chinese were yanking his leg with the devices:
Though he indicated the explanation for that signal might be a bit more nefarious:
Jokes aside, I suspect there may be a clandestine ground station in western Canada or NW USA actually ... This is the second sighting of this emission on a similar pass trajectory ...
The Shenlong spacecraft has been in secret development for nearly 20 years. It has reportedly been launched several times, most recently this month.
Unsurprisingly, the ChiComs have kept the program pretty much under wraps — Communists are famously paranoid and don't like to share — so there's not a ton of information on this thing.
But the Shenlong was reportedly "developed for the China National Space Administration as well as the Chinese People's Liberation Army" and it allegedly "shares similarities with Boeing's X-37B, an orbital test vehicle variant used by the U.S. Space Force."
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