Alabama rocket builder United Launch Alliance (ULA) launched the secretive Boeing X-37B space plane back to orbit on Sunday.
The mission, conducted on behalf of the U.S. Space Force, marked X-37B’s sixth trip to space and the fifth time it was delivered by ULA. For this mission, ULA employed its Atlas V 501 rocket built at the company’s 1.6 million square foot facility in Decatur.
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Launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this was ULA’s second mission for the U.S. Space Force. The company previously completed the newly-formed space agency’s first national security space mission in March.
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The X-37B is an autonomous, reusable spacecraft built by Boeing for the U.S. Air Force. It is designed to operate in low-earth orbit, 150 to 500 miles above the Earth.
Although part of a classified program, the X-37B has been more visible to the public lately. Two different X-37B vehicles have been built.
What started out as a program featuring short trips to and from space has turned into long missions.
“Each flight has been successively longer in setting a record for duration,” Boeing’s Jim Chilton recently outlined. “The last flight was 780 days, start to finish. If you add up all the missions, just under eight years in orbit and a billion miles. So a lot of traveling by this machine. It has hosted a wide-variety of experiments and kind of advanced the state-of-the-art in both reusable vehicles and the experiments you can host.”
In 2012, the U.S. Air Force released footage of the vehicle returning from its second mission.
Tim Howe is an owner of Yellowhammer Multimedia
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