FOX News: Air Force sends mystery mini-shuttle back to space

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Air Force sends mystery mini-shuttle back to space Dec 11th 2012, 18:45 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. –  A top-secret mini-space shuttle has blasted off from Cape Canaveral. The Air Force launched the unmanned spacecraft Tuesday aboard an Atlas V rocket. It's the second flight for this original X-37B spaceplane. It circled the planet for seven months in 2010. A second X-37B spacecraft spent more than a year in orbit. These mystery machines are about one-quarter the size of NASA's old space shuttles and they can land automatically on a runway. The military isn't saying much if anything about this new secret mission. But one scientific observer, Harvard University's Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, speculates the spaceplane is carrying sensors designed for spying and likely is serving as a testbed. The two previous secret flights were in roughly 200-plus-mile-high orbits. The X-37B program is being run by the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. The two space planes in the fleet — which are 29 feet long and 15 feet wide, with a payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed — were built by Boeing Government Space Systems, according to Space.com.  According to an Air Force factsheet, the Rapid Capabilities Office is working on the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle "to demonstrate a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the United States Air Force." While both previous X-37B missions touched down at Vandenberg, the Air Force has been reviewing the prospect of landing future flights at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, next door to the Cape Canaveral launch site. Returning the robotic space plane to the KSC landing strip — which was used by NASA's now-retired space shuttle fleet — would lower costs, because the vehicle wouldn't have to be transported back from California to Florida after each mission.

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