The reusable spacecraft landed at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in a remote area of ​​northwest China on Friday, September 6. A rocket was launched from the same location, Chinese state media Xinhua reported Long March 2F It spent 268 days in orbit during the third mission on December 14, 2023.

While the space plane’s exact capabilities are largely unknown, Xinhua said the vehicle “will pave the way for more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future.”

It’s not known exactly what the Chinese spacecraft did on this latest mission or any other. As on previous missions, the spacecraft’s ground trackers watched as it launched a small object into orbit.

“This object could be a deployed subsatellite, or it could be a piece of hardware that was jettisoned before the mission was finished and deorbited (the first spaceflight did something similar),” Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell said in a release from the Center for Astrophysics X.

The spacecraft appears to be conducting what’s known as a rendezvous and approach operation (RPO), which means it’s testing its ability to rendezvous with and approach an object in space, SpaceNews reported.

These operations could be used to repair or maintain friendly satellites, and it is believed that military superpowers are perfecting these techniques to potentially intercept enemy satellites in any future orbital war. China’s space plane launched in this latest mission just two days before the US Space Force was scheduled to launch its own X-37B reusable orbiter.

That launch was aborted approximately 30 minutes into the countdown, and the X-37B went on to launch with its seventh mission two weeks later on December 28, 2023. As with China’s space plane, the X-37B’s capabilities and missions are largely classified; it is known to be an orbital testbed for new technologies, but that’s about it.