Central Florida residents from coast to coast were shocked awake before sunrise on Saturday morning by the sonic boom of an unpiloted spaceplane reentering the atmosphere after more than two years in orbit. The craft, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), is an ongoing project that’s currently headed by the U.S. Space Force. Despite this being its sixth mission, little is known publicly about the specifics of its duties.
The X-37 family has been around for over two decades, first as an initiative under NASA before it was eventually given over to the military, which developed the X-37B variant and made it classified. The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is reusable and autonomous, looking much like a shrunk-down space shuttle. Since 2010, it has been used to host secretive experiments in orbit while testing the limits of how long a craft of this kind can remain in flight. Its previous record, set in 2019, stood at 780 days.
This time around, the X-37B was in orbit for 908 days, according to the military and NASA experiments, including an investigation on the effects of radiation on seeds in an attempt to inform future agricultural efforts in space.
The Experiments Flying With OTV-6
The seed experiment was one of multiple NASA projects onboard OTV-6. The space agency also mounted sample plates on the craft to test the effectiveness of different protective materials that are in development, specifically thermal control coatings, printed electronics, and radiation shields. There were also projects from the Naval Research Lab and the Air Force on OTV-6. The former centered on an experimental antenna, the Photovoltaic RadioFrequency Antenna Module, designed to capture sunlight from outside Earth’s atmosphere and “transmit power to the ground in the form of radio frequency microwave energy.” According to the Space Force, it was successful in capturing those solar rays. For the Air Force Academy, OTV-6 last year deployed the microsatellite FalconSat-8, which will be used to train future space operators.
Less clear is what the X-37B spent the rest of its time doing in the last two and a half years. The military has been characteristically cryptic about its activities despite years of speculation about its potential use for surveillance or shuttling spy satellites to orbit. Its latest update on the spaceplane is no more telling. “The X-37B continues to push the boundaries of experimentation,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Fritschen, X-37B Program Director, in a statement on the mission’s return to Earth. Whatever its true purpose, there’s more to come for the X-37B. As part of OTV-6, the Space Force introduced a service module that will allow the spaceplane to take on even more experiments per mission.
Source: Space Force News, WFLA