The Boeing-built spaceplane was mounted on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket Tuesday inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 41 launch pad. Military officials announced new details about the upcoming X-37B mission Wednesday, and confirmed its target launch date of May 16. military’s reusable X-37B spaceplane - scheduled for liftoff May 16 from Cape Canaveral - will carry more experiments into orbit than any of the winged ship’s previous missions, including two payloads for NASA and a small deployable satellite built by Air Force Academy cadets. Click here to finish the story for free.The X-37B spacecraft is encapsulated inside the Atlas 5 rocket’s payload fairing inside a processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. ➡ Love what you’re reading? There’s a lot more on page 2. So, is the X-37B a nuclear-armed bomber? Well, no-but it is possible. hasn’t revealed any plans to build a fleet of eight spacecraft that could include a mix of any of the three designs.
Both planes are commercial, privately owned aircraft. While there are competing space plane designs, including the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser and Virgin Galactic’s Unity spacecraft, only Unity has flown into space. The X-37B most recently launched its sixth mission-testing a solar power system that beams energy to Earth with a laser-in May 2020, and before that, it famously stayed in space for a record-setting 780 days, returning home in October 2019 from a mission that saw it host “Air Force Research Laboratory experiments, among others” and provide a “ride for small satellites,” per an Air Force press release.įor all of its successes, there’s just one American unmanned space plane: the X-37B-not two, as Novikov claims. The reusable craft’s ability to orbit in either environment makes it both special and challenging in the existing landscape of airplanes and spacecraft.
Where a classic amphibious vehicle is designed to manage on land or in water, the X-37B thrives in both air and space, using the physics of the atmosphere for self defense and eluding enemies. And for good measure, Novikov claimed the Air Force will expand its fleet of unmanned craft to eight by 2025. Novikov also said while the Air Force officially built the X-37B for “scientific research,” it actually developed the spacecraft for reconnaissance-and, in fact, it serves as a nuclear-armed space bomber. has two unmanned spaceplanes: a large shuttle, which can carry up to six nuclear weapons, and a smaller spacecraft, which can carry three. Yan Novikov, the director-general of the state-owned Almaz-Antey design firm, made the false claim during the virtual New Knowledge conference, according to Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti.ĭuring the event, Novikov said the U.S. Air Force’s unmanned X-37B spaceplane is a secret space bomber that can drop nuclear warheads from orbit. The head of a Russian defense contractor recently said the U.S. Besides, the X-37B is of dubious value as a space bomber.
Yan Novikov also says there are two types of space shuttles, and the fleet would grow fourfold by 2025.The leader of a prominent, state-owned Russian defense contractor claims the Air Force’s X-37B spaceplane can carry nuclear weapons.
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