Secret US spaceplane lands after 15 months in orbit

The US Air Force’s secret spaceplane X-37B OTV-2 has finally returned to Earth, after spending a record-setting 15 months in orbit.

These X-37B orbital test vehicles are Boeing-built unmanned planes that are about a fourth the size of a Nasa space shuttle. They’ve got solar panels, automatic guidance and nifty thermal silica ceramic thermal protection tiles so it can shrug off the heat of atmospheric reentry.

The Air Force says that the vehicles have been going into orbit “to conduct on-orbit experiments, primarily checkout of the vehicle itself.” We also know that there’s a super-secret payload on board — a detail that has fuelled much speculation and rumour.

The first Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-1) flew from April to December 2010. For its successor, the Air Force wanted to go for even longer.

“We knew from post-flight assessments from the first mission that OTV-1 could have stayed in orbit longer,” explains programme manager Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre. “So one of the goals of this mission was to see how much farther we could push the on-orbit duration.”

OTV-2 smashed its mission duration of 270 days, and stayed in orbit for 469 days before finally touching down at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on 16 June.

The Air Force says that the craft “allows space technology experts to continue sending up experiments” — after the retirement of the shuttle fleet — “with results returning safely to Earth for study”. Defence analysts say that the mystery plane could be used for reconnaissance in conflict regions.

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