On May 28, 2024, a satellite built to photograph farmland, mines and shipping lanes turned its telescope sideways and photographed a classified Chinese spacecraft from a range of just under 90 kilometers (56 miles). The satellite was WorldView-3, operated by Vantor, the company formerly known as Maxar. The target was one of China’s two reusable spaceplanes, the Shenlong or the Tengyun — the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which published the image on October 26, 2026 in its report Challenges to Security in Space, will not say which.
The mechanism behind the photo is called non-Earth imaging, or NEI: pointing an Earth-observation satellite’s optics at something other than Earth — another satellite, debris, the Moon — instead of the ground. The capability itself is old; spy agencies have used it for decades. What changed is who can buy it. In December 2022, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration modified Maxar’s remote-sensing license to let it sell NEI to government and commercial customers, the first such license granted to a private company. The license covers low Earth orbit, 200 to 1,000 kilometers up, at a stated resolution finer than six inches — the same optics that image a parking lot from orbit, retasked.
As Ars Technica reported, this is a different kind of surveillance from Russia’s Kosmos 2612, a military satellite that deliberately stalked a US-registered radar satellite earlier this month. A dedicated inspector satellite loiters and closes distance on purpose. A commercial imaging satellite gets its shot by chance, at high relative speed, because it happened to be in the neighborhood doing its day job. Either way, the DIA’s point is that low Earth orbit no longer offers much cover: something in it is, by now, usually pointed at everything else in it.
The published photo shows the spaceplane’s underside, its service module attached with solar arrays deployed, and what analysts read as open payload-bay doors. Before this release, the public record on the Chinese spaceplane consisted of blurry ground-based telescope shots and artists’ renderings. The DIA’s own caption still withholds the one fact a spotter’s forum would most want: which of the two Chinese models — Shenlong or Tengyun — is pictured. Both are commonly described, including by US analysts cited in The War Zone, as resembling a scaled-down version of the US Space Force’s X-37B, down to the delta wings and twin tails, though the Chinese airframe’s wings have a longer chord.
Four flights, each longer than the last
China has flown the spaceplane four times since 2020. The first mission lasted two days. The second, launched in August 2022, lasted 276 days. The third, from December 14, 2023 to September 6, 2024, lasted 267 days and involved releasing multiple small, unidentified objects into orbit — their purpose was never disclosed. The fourth launched on February 7, 2026 and, as of this report, has not come home.
On the current, fourth mission, the spaceplane has released and recaptured a sub-satellite twice: once in June and July, again in August and September, according to the DIA report. US analysts read these as rehearsals for satellite servicing, or for intercepting and disabling someone else’s satellite — the same maneuver, performed on a hostile target instead of a cooperative one, looks identical from the ground.
Lasers, on a schedule marked “late 2020s”
The DIA report’s other headline claim is about directed-energy weapons: lasers and high-power microwave systems that disable a satellite by burning, blinding or frying its sensors rather than hitting it with anything physical. Here the agency is careful to separate what it has observed from what it projects. Measured: China already operates multiple ground-based laser weapons of varying power, capable of disrupting, degrading or damaging satellites in low Earth orbit — a capability aimed mainly at dazzling optical sensors, not necessarily destroying a spacecraft. Projected: “By the late 2020s, China may field space-based directed energy systems and higher-powered ground-based directed energy systems capable of threatening satellites in higher orbits,” the DIA wrote. That is a “may,” not a “will,” and the agency does not publish the power levels, the orbits, or the evidence behind the projection, which remains classified.
The report adds two more entries to China’s counterspace ledger: a satellite-refueling demonstration in geosynchronous orbit — roughly 36,000 kilometers up — that the DIA says no other country has performed above low Earth orbit, and a robotic arm, tested on orbit, capable of grappling another spacecraft.
The buzzing in geostationary orbit
China runs a fleet of satellites called TJS that routinely closes on foreign spacecraft in the geostationary belt, 36,000 kilometers up, where communications and early-warning satellites sit. TJS-3 came within 6.2 kilometers (3.8 miles) of the US satellite USA 233 in October 2022, according to Space.com. The traffic runs both ways: in April 2025 a US surveillance satellite passed within 11.9 kilometers (7.4 miles) of TJS-17 and 16.9 kilometers (10.5 miles) of TJS-16. Analysts cited in that reporting note a distinction worth keeping: China has so far only been observed doing this kind of close-approach maneuver with its own satellites, not confirmed to have done it to a foreign one — unlike the pattern Russia has set, below.
The Pentagon’s mirror fleet
The US Space Force runs its own constellation of inspector satellites in geosynchronous orbit and has recently bought more that can be refueled on orbit, removing the maneuvering limits that come from launching with a fixed fuel load. On September 15, 2026, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told the Air, Space and Cyber Conference that the US has fielded “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action” — the first public acknowledgment by any nation that it has deployed weapons in orbit. Meink gave no details on what the weapons are, how they work, or when they went up.
In general this is a very destabilizing statement by the United States.
That assessment came from Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation, responding to Meink’s remarks.
Russia’s nesting dolls
Russia’s program is called Nivelir, and its design is sometimes described as a set of nesting dolls: a satellite that carries a smaller inspector satellite, which can in turn deploy a kill vehicle. In July 2020, Kosmos 2543 approached another Russian satellite, Kosmos 2521, and ejected an object that shifted its own perigee and apogee by roughly 100 and 170 kilometers, moving at a relative speed of about 700 km/h — Defense One reported that the US Space Force called it a non-destructive test of a space-based anti-satellite weapon, and the UK Ministry of Defence, in its first-ever public criticism of Russian conduct in space, said the ejected object had “the characteristics of a weapon.”
General Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, has since said the program moved from testing to operational deployment: a Russian satellite launched in May 2025, Cosmos 2588, was placed co-orbital with the US reconnaissance satellite USA 338, part of the National Reconnaissance Office’s Crystal series — the fourth time in five years a Russian satellite has been positioned alongside a US optical spy satellite this way, Breaking Defense reported. Of an earlier case, Whiting said the orbital parameters matched Russian tests from 2017, 2019 and 2022: “that doesn’t seem to be accidental.”
The same playbook appeared against a civilian target this year. In April 2026, Russia launched a fleet of small satellites into an orbit near ICEYE’s commercial radar-imaging satellite, which supplies reconnaissance imagery to Ukraine. In October, one of those satellites, Kosmos 2612, closed to within “tens of meters” of the ICEYE satellite before backing off — an episode on which Russia and the US have since given contradictory accounts, Moscow describing the approach as peaceful and Washington calling it threatening. US intelligence officials separately assess that Russia is pursuing a nuclear weapon for use in space, a program distinct from Nivelir.
China’s state media dismissed the DIA report on publication. The Global Times quoted a Chinese commentator accusing Washington of “thief crying stop thief,” arguing the US is itself converting space from a domain of reconnaissance and communications into one of direct offensive and defensive operations — a charge the DIA report’s own account of Space Force weapons and GEO inspector satellites does little to rebut.
What the DIA report does not say is more interesting than what it does. It will not name the spaceplane photographed in 2024. It will not give a power level, a range, or a date for China’s projected space-based laser. It will not say what weapon Meink was describing in September, or when it reached orbit. The next test of all of this is whether a Vantor camera, or one like it, catches whichever of those systems flies first — and whether anyone admits what it saw.