After a Year In Orbit, US Air Force's X37-B Will Conclude Its Secret Mission

SomePgmr writes "The U.S Air Force's highly secret unmanned space plane will land in June — ending a year-long mission in orbit. The experimental Boeing X37-B has been circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour and was due to land in California in December. It is now expected to land in mid to late June. And still, no one knows what the space drone has been doing up there all this time."

Comments

Re:'NO ONE KNOWS" ????

[Talderas]

I have a suspicion. It's a simple one too.

This is a drone that is designed to land. When a craft exits orbit and enters our atmosphere there have been three three styles of entries. There are those which burn up. There are those like the Soyuz, Dragon, and Apollo capsules. There was a space shuttle. The drone is obviously meant to reenter like the space shuttle in some fashion.

One thing that has been desirable has been to keep surveillance drones in flight for as long as possible. The longest shuttle mission was 17 days and 15 hours. This drone has been up there for a year before coming down.

The Chinese have demonstrated that they have the ability to shoot down satellites so a drone spy satellite that has good maneuverability in orbit would be a plus.

I think they're aiming to replace spy satellites with these drones and this was a test to see if a drone can stay up in space for a long duration and still arrive back on ground intact for repairs or to upgrade its system.