Don't Buy China's Hypersonic Head-Fake. Its Spaceplanes Are Racing Ahead.
In the past five years, China’s spaceplane development has accelerated, adding breakthroughs, tests, and new industry players.
By Daniel Shats and Peter W. Singer
December 13, 2021
After shocked U.S. leaders decried China’s August flight of a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle, Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tried a head fake, issuing a statement that actually referred to the July test of a reusable spaceplane. Yet even that misdirecting statement contained another attempt at misdirection. While the government described the spaceplane’s flight as a “routine” mission, it was in fact the first successful suborbital flight from launch to landing, a crucial step in the advancement towards a game-changing technology.
Hypersonics may be getting more of the recent attention, but the spaceplane work is an area of both economic and national security significance. As BluePath Labs explored in a recent report for the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute, China’s spaceplane efforts have skyrocketed since 2016, led not only by stalwarts of China’s aerospace industry, but by a growing number of private startups.
Broadly, a spaceplane is a vehicle that combines characteristics of an airplane and a spacecraft, capable of flight both in the atmosphere and in space. Spaceplanes are launched either vertically on a rocket (like the Space Shuttle and its successor, Boeing’s X-37B) or horizontally from a carrier airplane (like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo), and land horizontally on a runway. The term “spaceplane” may refer to the orbiter or to the entire multistage configuration. Self-launching single-stage spaceplanes have been conceived but not developed.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/12/dont-buy-chinas-hypersonic-head-fake-its-spaceplanes-are-racing-ahead/359705/
