China may have just flown a new space plane
 

Details here

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/91111...dence-suggests

More here:

https://spacenews.com/china-carries-...al-spacecraft/

Also for the anoraks there's some orbital and other analysis on the satrackcam Leiden blog that Google might help you find - this forum's website is blocking the URL for the blog.

I suppose it was inevitable that China would get its own version of Homey Airport.

Learn from the best..........

What are these long flying unmanned space planes good for? To put mines on or bug other nation's satellites? Or to inspect or steal them?
Everybody seems to want one these days.

Tests things out in space and see how they last - new materials, types of glass or composite lenses, antennae, electronic component EMC etc, and recover them to inspect them in the lab.
For example chip level atomic clocks etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_D...osure_Facility

Speculating, but presumably it can be quite useful to have a ready-made and tested satellite to which you can bolt a new set of instruments at relatively short notice. Whenever something new crops up that you want to "measure" from orbit, all you have to do is build the "measuring instrument", plug it into the existing satellite bus and launch it. The only thing that needs to be designed/built is the new instrumentation; the power supply, cooling, manoeuvring, comms etc is already taken care of. If something changes, requiring you to modify your instrumentation, you just land it, make your changes and relaunch. That may well be quicker than building a new satellite from scratch, and could plausibly be cheaper too.