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Unmanned US Air Force Space Plane Lands After Secret, Two-Year Mission (reuters.com)

Irene Klotz, reporting for Reuters: The U.S. military's experimental X-37B space plane landed on Sunday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years, the Air Force said. The unmanned X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, touched down at 7:47 a.m. EDT (1147 GMT) on a runway formerly used for landings of the now-mothballed space shuttles, the Air Force said in an email. The Boeing-built space plane blasted off in May 2015 from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas 5 rocket built by United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The X-37B, one of two in the Air Force fleet, conducted unspecified experiments for more than 700 days while in orbit. It was the fourth and lengthiest mission so far for the secretive program, managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Duplicate detected by Dog-Cow · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Yo, Slashdot, your "editor" script is broken again. The original is still on the front page.

  2. Read this yesterday... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Would be nice if the weekday editors would check with the weekend editors to find out if a topic was previously published over the weekend. Oh, let see, like yesterday?