The U.S. military's mysterious X-37B space plane is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 16, kicking off the sixth mission for the robotic vehicle, Space Force and Air Force officials announced.
The upcoming mission, known as OTV-6 (short for "Orbital Test Vehicle-6") and Space Force-7, will also deploy FalconSat-8, a small satellite developed by the U.S. Air Force Academy that itself carries five separate experiments.
To accommodate these and other payloads, the space plane has been outfitted with a service module for OTV-6 — a first for the X-37B program, Air Force officials said in a statement today.
Each X-37B is 8.8 meters long by 2.9 m tall, with a wingspan of about 4.6 m and a payload bay the size of a pickup truck bed. For comparison, each space shuttle was 37 m long with a wingspan of 24 m, Space.com reported.
The X-37B allows the U.S. military to test a variety of new tech in the space environment and return the gear to the ground for analysis. Many of the payloads that go up are classified, and military officials tend not to disclose many details of the vehicles' activities in orbit.
It's unclear how long OTV-6 will last, but precedent suggests that the mission will be a sustained one. Each OTV flight has broken duration records for the program, and OTV-5, which landed in October 2019, circled Earth for 780 days.
The five previous X-37B missions racked up a combined 2,865 days in orbit, Barrett said. That's about 7 years and 10 months of off-Earth technology testing.
