A secret space plane
An unmanned U.S. spacecraft landed on Sunday after a record-breaking 780 days in orbit — but possibly only the Pentagon is sure what it’s been up to.
The Boeing-built X-37B resembles a small version of NASA’s retired space shuttles. It was launched via a SpaceX rocket on Sept. 7, 2017, but flew back to the Kennedy Space Center like a plane.
Reporting on a previous flight, Tim Fernholz of Quartz described the X-37B as one of the “weirdest open secrets in space,” a reminder to Russia and China that the U.S. “has a maneuverable spacecraft capable of hanging out quietly in orbit, shadowing their space assets, and doing, well, who knows what?”
This flight’s mission was to “test experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipe technologies,” according to a U.S. Air Force statement, and to provide “a ride for small satellites.”
That alarmed Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who noted that the U.S. had not registered any satellite deployments, as required by U.N. convention.
“This would be the first time that either the USA or Russia has blatantly flouted the Convention,” he tweeted.
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