On Thursday night, the covert X-37B robot spaceplane of the US military took off on its seventh mission from Florida. It was the first to be launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which could have carried it to a higher orbit than ever before.
In a breathtaking liftoff seen live on a SpaceX webcast, the Falcon Heavy, which is made up of three liquid-fueled rocket cores strapped together, blasted off its launch pad from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral.
After more than two weeks of false starts and delays brought on by bad weather and unclear technical problems, the spacecraft was rolled back to its hangar by ground crews before Thursday’s flight.
It happened two weeks after the US-Sino space rivalry grew even more intense when China’s Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” robot spaceplane made its third orbital flight since 2020.
Few details regarding the X-37B mission, which was carried out by the US Space Force as part of the National Security Space Launch programme of the military, have been made public by the Pentagon.
The vehicle is made by Boeing and is about the size of a small bus. It looks like a miniature space shuttle and is designed to carry out technology experiments and deliver different payloads during lengthy orbital flights. When the mission is over, the craft returns through the atmosphere and lands on a runway, just like an aeroplane would.
Since 2010, it has completed six missions. The first five were launched into orbit using United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rockets, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The most recent mission took place in May 2020 and used a Falcon 9 booster provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
