Mysterious Spacecraft Lands at Space Force Base

The Space Force's top-secret X-37B spaceplane has landed after spending well over a year orbiting the Earth. The enigmatic space plane launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in December 2023. What exactly it did while circling the planet without a crew on board for the next 434 days, its seventh flight to date, remains mostly a mystery. In a vaguely-worded statement, the Space Force revealed that "Mission 7 accomplished a range of test and experimentation objectives intended to demonstrate the X-37B’s robust maneuver capability while helping characterize the space domain through the testing of space domain awareness technology experiments." Last month, the Space Force published a photo showing the side of the spacecraft with a distant Earth looming in the background, demonstrating its highly elliptical orbit. In October, the military branch announced X-37B would be performing a series of "aerobraking" maneuvers to slow itself down while clipping through the upper reaches of the a ... Read full article.