The US military’s top-secret X-37B robotic spaceplane has launched on its seventh mission from Florida.
The mission is the first time the plane has been launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which can transport it to a higher orbit than ever before.
The Falcon Heavy, which is made up of three rocket cores joined together, rocketed off the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday in a dramatic midnight lift-off that was live webcast.
The US launch comes two weeks after China’s own robot spaceplane, known as the Shenlong, or Divine Dragon, was launched on its third mission into orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the two countries’ growing rivalry in space.
The Pentagon has released scant specifics about the X-37B mission, which is being carried out by the US Space Force as part of the military’s National Security Space Launch program and is scheduled to span years.
The autonomous Boeing-built aircraft is around nine meters (29 feet) long and resembles a tiny space shuttle. It carries several experiments.
Its first mission was in 2010, and the most recent was in May 2020, with all missions taking place in low-Earth orbit at altitudes of less than 2,000km (1,200 miles).
The Pentagon has not said how high the plane will fly during this mission, but in a statement last month, the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office said it would involve tests of “new orbital regimes, experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies”.
The X-37B is also carrying out an experiment to study how plant seeds are affected by prolonged exposure to the harsh environment of radiation in space.
China’s equally secretive Shenlong was launched on December 14 by a Long March 2F rocket.
The planned duration of the latest X-37B mission has not been made public, but it will presumably run until June 2026 or later, given the prevailing pattern of successively longer flights.
The last flight, the longest one yet, lasted for two and a half years before touching down on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center in November last year.
