"While this type of close approach activity does not automatically signify a military mission, it obviously could provide a co-orbital counterspace capability," expert Victoria Samson told Breaking Defense.
"China is replacing Russia as the No. 2 space power," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., told Breaking Defense.
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
"I think there are more questions than answers right now when it comes to SJ-21," Todd Harrison, director of CSIS's Aerospace Project, told Breaking Defense.