Secret military space plane passes 500 days

The actual title has been edited to fit.

"US Military Space Plane Wings Past 500 Days on Latest Mystery Mission"

500 days in orbit with no word on its actual mission.
The story says it has changed orbit so it's still under control and not a floater...

"The current mission — known as Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-5) — was rocketed into Earth orbit on Sept. 7, 2017, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida."


"Each X-37B/OTV mission has set a new flight-duration record for the program.

OTV-1 began April 22, 2010, and concluded on Dec. 3, 2010, after 224 days in orbit.

OTV-2 began March 5, 2011, and concluded on June 16, 2012, after 468 days on orbit.

OTV-3 chalked up nearly 675 days in orbit before finally coming down on Oct. 17, 2014.

OTV-4 conducted on-orbit experiments for 718 days during its mission, extending the total number of days spent in space for the OTV program at that point to 2,085 days. It was launched in May 2015 and landed in May 2017."

Wonder what its doing...

www.space.com...

Military commissioning Space X ?! Dang...

Sounds like longevity test trials.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Ah yes I know of the plane X-37B hashtag semicolon project ivory giraffe-The military needs to work on their jargon.

I mention military because if I may put my tin foil hat on methinks it could be used to intercept and/or corrupt information from the thousands of satellites surrounding our planet.

It's threads like these that drew me to ATS nearly twenty years ago, nice job.

a reply to: Thecakeisalie

I'm thinking it's more of a moveable spy satellite.

It orbits around the earth once every 90 mins. And when people try to track it. It may have moved to a new trajectory.

Sounds like a perfect spy platform to me.

IMO

a reply to: grey580

That was my first thought too but I'm not sure the payload is large enough to accommodate that much equipment.

Satellites are all different sizes of course.

a reply to: Bluntone22

I wonder how far away it could travel in that time.

Considering we cut the time in half, for each missions duration. We could gage it's round trip capability.

Giving us a potential range, which is one possible scenario they could be testing.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Who knows what sort of stuff they may have on there.

While it's not so big it maybe they have a few tricks to make what it can carry more effective.

Atmospheric lensing comes to mind.

a reply to: ADVISOR

It's tracked in orbit for most of its mission by amateurs.

a reply to: Bluntone22

You'd be surprised at how boring a lot of what it does really is. I believe it was OTV-4 that was testing an HET that was mounted in the payload bay.

a reply to: Zaphod58

That's good to know, thanks for the info.

I honestly don't follow it closely, but am interested when I see topics on it.

Last thing I was following in relation to the program, was when the first one tested vanished.

However I'm probably thinking of a different project altogether. Seems these tests have overlap if are different.

lost in test flight

a reply to: ADVISOR

They disappear for a few days when they change orbits. They've made some pretty radical changes to their orbit.

Any chance we can strap photon torpedos on these soon??? We need to have them before our potential rivals do is my motto.