The unmanned space aircraft , the size of a small business jet keeps doing its missions…..
Looking down and around on things?…..
And having people talk about unclassified stuff to make sure the ‘ship’ gets funded?….
The mission has “a wide range of test and experimentation objectives,” is the Pentagon’s official statement. “These tests include operating the reusable spaceplane in new orbital regimes, experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies.”
The reference about “space domain awareness” could mean that it will be keeping an eye on other satellites, potentially watching for threats. Having a better sense of what is going on in the vastness of space — where adversaries’ spacecraft are and what they are doing — has become a key mission of the U.S. Space Force. “Our space systems are threatened by a variety of growing antisatellite capabilities, and the joint force is threatened by increasingly sophisticated adversary space-based systems intended to target the joint force,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of space operations, said in a statement to Congressearlier this year….
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The Boeing built X-37B has also been used to deploy small satellites, but what those did was also a mystery.
“The U.S. government is in this weird place where they brag publicly about how amazing it is and cutting edge, but will not provide any info about it,” said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.
Much of the speculation about the vehicle is probably wrong, he said. For now, its reputation is tied primarily to “its mystique,” he said, though it seems clear that “it’s doing something that the Pentagon feels is very important.”…
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If Sunday’s X-37B mission is like previous ones, the spaceplane could be in space for a while. Its first flight, which launched in 2010, lasted 224 days. Since then, each mission has gotten longer, and when it touched down at Cape Canaveral after its last flight in November 2022, it had been in orbit for 908 days. In all, the spaceplane has spent more than 10 years in space, which has allowed the Pentagon to gain all sorts of data about how different components fare in space for extended durations…
image…US Space Force