From Discovery News:
Shrouded by darkness, the military’s miniature space shuttle -- a unmanned robotic craft -- returned early Friday from a trial run in orbit that spanned 224 days.
The Orbital Test Vehicle, also known as the X-37B, touched down at 1:16 a.m. PST at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, becoming the first U.S. vehicle to make an autonomous runway landing from space.
Rather than hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells like the space shuttle orbiters, the X-37B is powered by gallium arsenide solar cells with lithium-ion batteries. It is designed to stay in orbit for up to 270 days, deorbit itself and land autonomously on a runway. NASA’s space shuttles can stay in space for up to about three weeks.
Fascinating.
So now there's a secret space program with a space orbiter? Well, there's this one that they're telling us about. What if there were actually two - or more?
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