China and Russia building their own Mysterious Space Plane?

The United States' robotic space plane, the X-37B, successfully returned to Earth last December after spending seven months in orbit doing nobody knows what. Now, it seems as though Russia and China want a piece of the action too. Looks like we might finally get that spaceship battle we've been waiting for since the dawn of sci-fi.

The head of Russia's military space forces has confirmed that they've been developing a small, unmanned space plane similar to the X-37B: "Something has been done along these lines, but as to whether we will use it, only time will tell." This seems to imply that they've actually got one of these things already, and if they do (a big if), they're definitely going to use it, although as with the United States' craft, they're likely not going to tell anybody exactly what for. Just to, you know, keep things exciting.

While China is also reportedly working on their own space plane, we should place heavy, heavy emphasis on that word "reportedly." The source of the report was, and I kid you not, an English website that nobody's heard of, citing a Chinese website that was apparently nuked by government censors, which was quoting a newspaper article, who got their material from a provincial governor on state-owned TV. Here's the quote:

Hong Kong's Ming Pao Daily on Tuesday said Shaanxi TV last Saturday quoted acting provincial governor Zhao Zhengyong as saying China has "succeeded in the test flight of a prototype aircraft that can fly through the atmospheric layer." Zhao was visiting a state-run aircraft corporation at Xi'an high-tech industrial development zone.

Chinese officials say that their rocket-powered space plane program may be a reaction to U.S. ambitions to dominate space and develop space planes, hypersonic transports and bombers.

It seems that China doesn't actually have a robotic space plane, and in fact isn't really anywhere close to having one. Still, the Western world was more or less blindsided by China's new stealth fighter which showed up out of nowhere last month, and while it's no spacecraft, it does suggest that there may be a thing or two going on that we don't know about.

Earth's orbit is certainly big enough for three space planes from three different nations, but the possibility that these space planes (which are military assets) could be configured to hunt down and destroy each other is certainly not out of the question. Maybe they'll use lasers (as imagined above), or maybe they'll launch guided space-missiles of their own, like these. Either way, it'll be epic, and we can only hope that an astronaut with a 3D IMax camera will somehow be up there filming it all.