Enter orbit and land without human intervention
The U.S. Air Force has kept an unmanned space shuttle in orbit for the past two years, and it seems no one without security clearance knows what it’s been doing up there.
The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, which can enter orbit and land without human intervention, is scheduled to touch down this week—the best guess is sometime on Tuesday—at Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif. The landing will mark completion of the program’s third and longest mission, which was launched on Dec. 11, 2012. The Air Force has two such spacecraft for these low-earth orbit missions, all of which are classified, as are the precise launch and landing times.
“The mission is basically top secret,” says Captain Chris Hoyler, an Air Force spokesman. The X-37B program came from technologies developed by Boeing (BA), NASA, the Air Force, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).
Boeing’s description of the craft says the Air Force uses it to “explore reusable space vehicle technologies in support of long-term space objectives.” Hoyler described the X-37B as a test platform “to advance the state of the art” in areas such as “thermal protection systems, solar power systems, thermal control, environmental modeling, autonomous control and landing, and control algorithms.”
The one definitive thing the Air Force will say about the X-37B is that it has no plans to develop a manned version. The spacecraft measures 29 feet long and 9.5 feet high, about one-fifth the size of the retired NASA space shuttles that seem to have inspired its appearance. It has a payload bay that opens in space, just like the larger space shuttles. The first X-37 mission ended in December 2010 after almost eight months in orbit.