The first X-37B lands in California in December 2010. Photo: Air Force
The past and future of America’s space arsenal intersected, briefly, in the summer of 2011. For two weeks in July, NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis roughly shared its Earth orbit with the Air Force’s X-37B, a 29-foot-long, highly maneuverable robotic spacecraft that entered service in early 2010 and has been cloaked in secrecy ever since. The X-37 was around 80 miles higher than the Shuttle, so it’s doubtful the four-person Atlantis crew, conducting the 135th and last Shuttle mission, ever saw the robotic craft. The X-37′s small size — barely a quarter the length of Atlantis — made a sighting even less likely.
Equally striking was the difference in cost between Atlantis and its tiny robotic compatriot. Atlantis costmore than $10 billion to design and build and around $500 million to launch on that one mission. The Boeing-built X-37 mini-shuttle set the taxpayers back an estimated $1 billion for development and construction and just $180 million to send into space. (All cost figures in this story are in today’s dollars.)
via Wired
