An unmanned spaceplane sent into Earth’s orbit in late 2023 returned on Friday, landing at California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base overnight, the U.S. Space Force said on Friday.
The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-7 was launched into space by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy for a classified, long-duration military mission for the U.S. Space Force on Dec. 29, 2023, CBS News previously reported. It was in high Earth orbit, or about 20,000 miles above the planet’s surface, for 434 days. The test vehicle had no crew.
The U.S. Space Force said in a news release that the craft had “accomplished a range of test and experimentation objectives intended to demonstrate the X-37B’s robust maneuver capability while helping characterize the space domain through the testing of space domain awareness technology experiments” while in orbit. One of those objectives included testing a new process called aerobraking, which saw the craft safely change orbit while using minimal fuel, the Space Force said on social media last month.
Another set of experiments tested “space domain awareness technology,” which helped improve the Space Force’s knowledge of the space environment, according to the news release. With space an “increasingly congested and contested environment,” knowledge of surrounding environments is “to the benefit of all users,” the Space Force said.
The craft landed successfully at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 2:22 a.m. ET, or 11:22 p.m. local time. The landing tested the craft’s ability to recover across multiple sites, the Space Force said.
Photos shared online show the vehicle on the ground at the base, with Space Force members standing nearby. The base has a three-mile long runway specifically built for B-37 craft, CBS News previously reported.
X-37B program director Lt. Col. Blaine Stewart said the craft’s successful operations “have written an exciting new chapter” and mark a “significant milestone in the ongoing development of the U.S. Space Force’s dynamic mission capability.”
The Space Force has access to two X-37B craft. The crafts, built by Boeing, are designed to help test avionics and advanced sensors, evaluate reusable spacecraft components and provide a platform for experiments that can be analyzed on Earth. The space planes feature delta wings, heat shield tiles and a compat payload bay, and are powered by an extendable solar array that allows for extremely long flights.
William Harwood
contributed to this report.
