On the same day that NASA's Glory satellite failed to reach orbit, the Air Force is prepping to launch its own spacecraft, though no one really knows what the mission aims to accomplish.
This space plane, known as X-37B, will depart via the Atlas V launch vehicle at 3:30pm Eastern on Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It will then fly itself across the country and land at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The launch service is being provided by the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a 50-50 joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which was formed in 2006 to provide access to space for U.S. government missions. ULA is collaborating with the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office (AFRCO) for today's launch.
The last flight for this particular device was on April 22, 2010. AFRCO said this week that April's mission "focused on testing and evaluating the performance capabilities of the vehicle" while today's effort "will build upon the OTV-1 on-orbit demonstration, validate and replicate initial testing and fine tune the technical parameters of the vehicle tests."
Beyond that, however, not much is known, and that has prompted interest from around the globe. As the Los Angeles Times notes, officials in Russia and China are watching X-37B with great interest. Lt. Gen. Oleg Ostapenko, the commander of Russia's space forces, told the state-run Novosti news agency that his country is developing a similar spacecraft. Li Daguang, a professor at People's Liberation Army National Defense University in China, said in an editorial that the device "it is capable of taking military actions against the enemy's satellite and space transportation devices," the Times wrote.
However, in a June blog post after the initial launch of X-37B, Laura Grego, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, was doubtful that a space plane like X-37B would be used for military attack purposes.
"The X-37B is a poor choice for placing weapons into orbit, including hypersonic strike vehicles intended for a conventional Global Strike mission," she wrote. "It is also unlikely for the space plane itself to perform the strike mission, as it is much bigger and slower (and much more expensive) than a re-entry vehicle or common aero vehicle."
Grego was hard-pressed "to find a mission for which the space plane makes sense. The reason is that you pay a big price for bringing the system back to Earth to reuse it, rather than developing a simpler and lighter system."
At the time, she said that "the only unique capability of a space plane appears to be its ability to return from orbit and land autonomously on a runway."