Secretive US space plane X-37B lands after record 908 days in orbit

Damn so much going on... thought I saw this mentioned here on ATS earlier and never got back to it. Has anybody got information on this? it sounds so cool. Seems like this could have so many capabilities. The uses are endless and not just militarily but for exploration and science. The conspiracy theories about X-378 are no doubt endless too.

www.newscientist.com...

The secretive X-37B space plane has beaten its previous flight duration record by staying in orbit for 908 days before landing. The autonomous craft, operated by the United States Space Force (USSF), is officially classified and therefore scant details about its purpose or missions are released, but officials say that the latest flight carried a host of scientific experiments.

The X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) began life under the umbrella of NASA, but was passed to the US military, which created the X-37B variant. That model first flew in orbit in 2010 and the two vehicles constructed so far have carried out increasingly lengthy flights, including a 674-day mission that ended in 2014. Its latest 908-day mission sets a new record for the craft, although many other space missions, such as the International Space Station, have been in orbit for longer periods.

The Boeing-constructed X-37B spacecraft looks like a miniature space shuttle and functions similarly, but without a human crew. It launches vertically inside the nose of an Atlas V or Falcon 9 rocket, spends long periods in space at an orbit of around 400 kilometres and then lands like a traditional aircraft upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.

Read more: Why the US military could replace spy satellites with solar planes
The landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on 12 November marked the end of the mission known as OTV-6, which started in May 2020. Officials say that it carried out a range of scientific experiments, including a test designed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, in which energy was collected by solar panels and beamed back to Earth as microwaves. It also released a satellite designed by cadets at the United States Air Force Academy that featured an electromagnetic propulsion system. Other experiments were provided by NASA, including some designed to test the effects of space exposure on various materials and seeds.

There is speculation that X-37B has a military as well as scientific purpose, just as the space shuttle before it did. The then-head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said in an interview earlier this year that the craft could be “a carrier of some kind of reconnaissance apparatus, and a carrier of weapons of mass destruction”.

The USSF didn’t respond to a request for comment, but a statement issued by Joseph Fritschen at the organisation said: “The X-37B continues to push the boundaries of experimentation, enabled by an elite government and industry team behind the scenes.

www.space.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: putnam6 youtu.be...

Do Any satellite have sensors to see if a drone or man is attaching a
computer to take over the satellite and send false infomation?
and have a air gun that fires a small bome? or ?

it should filme it to. so they can shoot down the ship that sent it.
it would be a act of war.

I wonder if it works so well why haven't they built a 2nd generation.

A few days ago, China's "space plane" released an unknown object into space:

spacenews.com...

Maybe the American space plane captured the object and returned it for examination....just a conspiratorial thought.

a reply to: WeDemBoyz

Maybe the Chinese space plane released a low-mass dummy object as bait to test the capabilities of the US spaceplane and detection.

Pure speculation of course.

OTV-6 included the Falcon 8 satellite experiment for the Air Force Academy, an experiment for NASA that exposed various plant seeds to space radiation, several new materials used for thermal coatings, printed elctronics, and radiation shields, as well as the Photovoltaic RadioFrequency Antenna Module for the Naval Research Laboratory. That experiment turned solar power into microwave energy and beamed it back to earth receivers.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Any ideas what the EM propulsion system could be? Is it likely to be along the lines of theoretical systems/engines like SUPREME or VASIMR or something even more advanced than those?

The experiments beaming solar power to Earth sound pretty incredible and combo of the experiments combined seems a lot more geared to colonising Mars/space/lunar mining/dyson spheres than the boring SIGINT/advanced spy satellite tech I expected.

a reply to: putnam6

Could be what these guys saw here:

America got rid of the shuttle program and replaced it with this. An unmanned space weapon built by the military industrial complex funded by taxpayers.

The militarization of space should not be celebrated. We celebrated the advancement of drone use in war, and look where that got us. Do you really trust the same people only this time the weapons platform is a few hundred miles up rather than a few thousand feet up?

Call me old fashioned but I miss when the American space program centered around exploration and was ran by (nazi)scientists. Rather than this current iteration...

Who know what they do up there for years at a time. They will never tell, and I can almost assure you it's not in our best interests. As things of this nature never are.

a reply to: putnam6

I wonder what kind of electromagnetic propulsion they mean , for that satellite they released...

a reply to: JAY1980

NASA has always been a military organisation.

originally posted by: WeDemBoyz
A few days ago, China's "space plane" released an unknown object into space:

spacenews.com...

Maybe the American space plane captured the object and returned it for examination....just a conspiratorial thought.

Maybe the object was a weapon of mass destruction, like an aerosol dispenser of the next virus pandemic.

Maybe it was dumping the contents of the septic tank into space contained within an enviromentally friendly object.

a reply to: bastion

I suspect its going to be something similar to VASIMR.

The X-37B does a lot of ISR, because it provides flexibility to change orbits unmatched by any satellite. They routinely make radical orbital changes that result in the ship being lost for several days by trackers, until the new orbit is located. That lets them be much less predictable than any other satellite in orbit. So they do a lot of what you suspect, but at the same time, it's the perfect orbital test platform. It gives them a long time in orbit to test exposure, and how well materials do, while in different configurations. One of the previous missions tested an improved Hall Thruster. They can't do that on the ISS, or anything else they're planning to send into orbit.

That experiment turned solar power into microwave energy and beamed it back to earth receivers.

Cant wait to hear of the energy return from that experiment.