Satellite Photos Show China Expanding Its Mysterious Desert Airfield
It inspires comparisons to Area-51: A massive, three-mile-long runway in a remote patch of Chinese desert, hundreds of miles from any cities. Now, it looks like the site is undergoing an expansion. Satellite imagery from the commercial company Maxar supplied exclusively to NPR shows around a dozen large concrete buildings under construction near the landing strip. The buildings mark a significant change at the airfield, which up until now lacked much in the way of permanent accommodation. "I think we''re observing what appears to be a pretty important facility for China''s military space activities that appears to be growing," says Ankit Panda , a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who tracks space issues there. The runway, on the edge of China''s former nuclear weapons test range at Lop Nur, sprung from nowhere in 2016. In 2020, observers believe that China landed a highly classified "space plane" there. Nobody knows exactly what the space plane looks like, but it probably resembles the Space Shuttles that used to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit, except smaller. "It''s certainly not, I would say, big enough to fly people," says Jonathan McDowell , an astronomer with the Center for Astrophysics Harvard and Smithsonian who tracks satellites and spacecraft.
Satellite Photos Show China Expanding Its Mysterious Desert Airfield
It inspires comparisons to Area-51: A massive, three-mile-long runway in a remote patch of Chinese desert, hundreds of miles from any cities. Now, it looks like the site is undergoing an expansion. Satellite imagery from the commercial company Maxar supplied exclusively to NPR shows around a dozen large concrete buildings under construction near the landing strip. The buildings mark a significant change at the airfield, which up until now lacked much in the way of permanent accommodation. "I think we''re observing what appears to be a pretty important facility for China''s military space activities that appears to be growing," says Ankit Panda , a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who tracks space issues there. The runway, on the edge of China''s former nuclear weapons test range at Lop Nur, sprung from nowhere in 2016. In 2020, observers believe that China landed a highly classified "space plane" there. Nobody knows exactly what the space plane looks like, but it probably resembles the Space Shuttles that used to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit, except smaller. "It''s certainly not, I would say, big enough to fly people," says Jonathan McDowell , an astronomer with the Center for Astrophysics Harvard and Smithsonian who tracks satellites and spacecraft.