When somebody was talking about different forms of space spying, it was traditionally considered as the usage of spy sattelites which allowed to follow the objects on Earth.
If the recent news are real it is a time to change this attitude. Several sources had informed that the United States were using their space shuttle to eavesdrop Chinese space laboratory.
The end of NASA's cruise flights doesn't mean that the gained experience would no be used on different projects. That is why in 1999 the agency had started to work on another shuttle ((unmanned vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing, VTHL), which would be able to do many space missions on much lower costs.
On March 2011 a new 9-metres-long shuttle was taken on the low orbit by the Atlas rocket. Soon the observers had noticed that X-37B's trajectory was different from traditional ones used by previous American shuttles. They have soon revealed that the trajectory was the same as the course chosen by another object in space - Chinese station Tiangong 1.
According to Beijing, Tiangong 1 is going to be the first module of Chinese space station, so we shouldn't be suprised that their main competitors are interested in their technology.
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