2023-12-28 15:03:09
After weeks of false starts and delays, SpaceX teams prepared once more Thursday to launch the Army’s secretive X-37B robotic spaceplane on its seventh mission, the first aboard a rocket capable of bring it into a higher orbit than ever before.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to blast off at night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, during a 10-minute launch window starting at 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 GMT Friday).
A series of three countdowns was canceled earlier this month due to bad weather and unspecified technical problems, leading ground teams to return the spacecraft to its hangar before making the final attempt to launch.
The launch comes two weeks following the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” China’s own reusable robotic spaceplane, launched on its third mission into orbit since 2020, adding a new dimension to the growing rivalry between the United States. United and China in the field of space.
The latest weather forecast for Thursday’s flight called for an 80 percent chance of favorable launch conditions.
The Defense Department has released few details regarding the X-37B mission, which is being conducted by the U.S. Space Force as part of the military’s National Security Space Launch Program.
The Boeing-built vehicle, the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, is intended to deploy various payloads and conduct technological experiments during long-duration orbital flights. At the end of its mission, the craft descends into the atmosphere to land on a landing strip, like an airplane.
It has flown six missions since 2010, with the first five carried into orbit by Atlas V rockets from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and most recently, in May 2020, atop a Falcon 9 booster. provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The impending mission would be the first to launch aboard SpaceX’s more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of carrying even heavier payloads than the X-37B farther into space, possibly into geosynchronous orbit, more than 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above Earth.
The X-37B, also called the orbital test vehicle, has until now been limited to flights in low Earth orbit, at altitudes below 2,000 km.
NEW ORBITAL DIETS AND SEEDS
The Pentagon did not specify at what altitude the spaceplane would fly this time. But in a statement last month, the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office said Mission No. 7 would include testing “new orbital regimes, experimentation with future space domain awareness technologies “.
The X-37B also carries a NASA experiment to study how plant seeds are affected by prolonged exposure to the harsh radiation environment of space. The ability to grow plants in space has major implications for feeding astronauts on future long-term missions to the Moon and Mars.
China’s equally secretive Shenlong was carried into space on December 14 by a Long March 2F rocket, a launch system less powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and limited to delivering payloads to low Earth orbit.
Nonetheless, Space Force Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told reporters at an industry conference earlier this month that he expected China to launch the Shenlong around the same time as the next flight of the X-37B, in what he suggested was a competitive maneuver.
“The Chinese are extremely interested in our space plane. We are extremely interested in theirs,” Mr. Saltzman said in remarks published by Air & Space Forces Magazine, a US aerospace journal.
“These are two of the most monitored objects in orbit while they are in orbit. It’s probably not a coincidence that they are trying to match us in terms of timing and sequence,” he added.
The expected duration of the flights.
The latest mission remained in orbit for more than two years before landing once more in November 2022. (Reporting by Joey Roulette and Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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