The mysterious American X-37B spaceplane will be launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket on December 10
The mysterious X-37B spaceplane of the US Space Force is almost ready for its seventh flight. The Space Force and SpaceX are “making final preparations” for the launch of the robotic X-37B scheduled for Sunday evening (December 10).
This was announced on December 7 by Space Force officials in an updated email.
The spaceplane is scheduled to take off atop a Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a 10-minute window that will begin at 20:14 EST (01:14 GMT on December 11).
The Space Force is believed to have two X-37B vehicles, both manufactured by Boeing. The spaceplanes are very similar to NASA’s old orbiters, but they are much smaller; both X-37Bs can fit inside the payload bay of a single space shuttle.
To date, the two X-37Bs have flown a total of six missions, each longer and more ambitious than the last. The latter, known as OTV-6 (Orbital Test Vehicle-6), landed in November 2022 after 908 days of orbiting the Earth.
It is unclear how long the upcoming OTV-7 flight will last; the Space Force has published few details about X-37B missions, as most of their payloads are classified. Some of this equipment is likely to be new intelligence tools; military officials have long stated that the X-37B is used primarily as a test bed for new technologies.
But the X-37B also carries some civilian research cargo. For example, one of the unclassified experiments being conducted at OTV-7 is Seeds-2, a NASA project that will test how seeds are affected by long-term exposure to cosmic radiation.
