US military's secretive spaceplane launched on possible higher-orbit mission
By Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -The U.S. military's secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than ever before.
The Falcon Heavy, composed of three liquid-fueled rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular nighttime liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast.
The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays attributed to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday's fight.
It came two weeks after China's own robot spaceplane, known as the Shenlong, or «Divine Dragon,» was launched on its third mission to orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing U.S.-Sino rivalry in space.
The Pentagon has disclosed few details about the X-37B mission, which is conducted by the U.S. Space Force under the military's National Security Space Launch program.
The Boeing-built vehicle, roughly the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, is built to deploy various payloads and conduct technology experiments on long-duration orbital flights. At the end of its mission, the craft descends back through the atmosphere to land on a runway much like an airplane.
It has flown six previous missions since 2010, the first five of them carried to orbit by Atlas (NYSE:ATCO) V rockets from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing (NYSE:BA) and Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT), and most recently, in May 2020, atop a Falcon 9 booster furnished by
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