by With Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – The US military’s secretive X-37B robotic plane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit higher than ever.
The Falcon Heavy, made up of three liquid-fueled rocket cores joined together, lifted off its launch pad from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular liftoff that was broadcast live on a SpaceX webcast.
The launch came after more than two weeks of false starts and delays due to bad weather and unspecified technical issues, prompting ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before resuming its flight on Thursday.
It came two weeks after China’s own robot space plane, known as the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” was launched on its third mission into orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing US-Sino rivalry in the space.
The Pentagon has released few details about the X-37B mission, led by the US Space Force under the military’s National Security Space Launch program.
The Boeing-built vehicle, about the size of a minibus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, has been built to deploy various payloads and conduct technological experiments on orbital flights for years. At the end of its mission, the craft goes back through the atmosphere to land on a runway similar to an airplane.
It has previously launched six missions since 2010, the first five of which were carried into orbit by an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and most recently, in May 2020, atop a Falcon booster 9 provided by Elon Musk’s Space X.
Thursday’s mission was the first launch aboard SpaceX’s more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket, which can carry payloads even heavier than the X-37B further into space, possibly into geosynchronous orbit, more than 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above Earth.
The X-37B, known as the Orbital Test Vehicle, was previously limited to flights in low Earth orbit, at altitudes below 1,200 miles (2,000 km).
‘NEW VEHICLE REGIONS, AND SEEDS’
The Pentagon has not said how high the space plane will fly this time. But in a statement last month, the Air Force Office of Rapid Capability said the mission, designated by the Space Force as USSF-52, would involve tests of “new orbital domains, testing future space domain awareness technologies .”
Such observations have led industry analysts and amateur space explorers to speculate that the X-37B may be engaged in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth or even a path that could swing it out into the vicinity of the moon, a region of space where the Pentagon has taken increasing interest.
“Maybe this thing is going out towards the moon and fall out of payload,” said Bob Hall, director of the space traffic monitoring firm COMSPOC, which analyzes the trajectories of orbital objects. The closer the spacecraft flies to the moon, the more difficult it will be to return safely to Earth.
It was unclear from Thursday’s webcast, which SpaceX said it downgraded at the military’s request, whether the X-37B had reached its destination in space. But the company later posted photos of the liftoff on X’s social media platform with the headline: “Falcon Heavy launches USSF-52 into orbit.”
The X-37B is also running a NASA experiment to study the effects of long exposure to the intense radiation environment of space on plant seeds. The ability to grow crops in space has major implications for feeding astronauts during future long-duration missions to the moon and Mars.
China’s equally secretive Shenlong was carried into space on December 14 by the Long March 2F rocket, a launch system less powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and believed to be limited to delivering payloads into orbit low-Earth.
Still, Space Force General B. Chance Saltzman told reporters at an industry conference earlier this month that he expected China to launch Shenlong around the same time as the X-37B flight in what he proposed which was a competitive movement.
“These are two of the most watched objects in orbit. It’s probably no coincidence that they’re trying to match us in time and in this order,” Saltzman said, according to a statement published in the Free Air & Space forces magazine.
The planned duration of the latest X-37B mission has not been made public, but it is likely to last until June 2026 or later, given the pattern of longer successive flights.
Its final mission remained in orbit for more than two years before landing in November 2022.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Additional writing and reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Lincoln Feast.)
