Military to Test NASA Space Plane

Aug. 12, 2008 -- Just as NASA is going out of the reusable spaceship business, the military is sticking its toe in the proverbial waters with a hand-me-down program salvaged from the cutting room floor.

The U.S. Air Force is a bit vague on details, but the gist of the plan is this: Sometime in December, an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket is to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying a prototype spaceship called the X-37B into orbit.

The experimental craft (that's what the X stands for) is to spend an undetermined number of days in space, circling the planet, before landing autonomously at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

An Evolving Mission

Exactly what the military would do with a space plane is unknown, but possible missions include carrying satellites to and from space, as well as repairing and servicing satellites in orbit.

"We wanted to develop a risk-reduction vehicle for space experimentation and to explore concepts of operation for a long-duration reusable space vehicle," the Air Force wrote in an email in response to questions from Discovery News.

Repeated requests to interview the program manager were declined.

X-37 was a NASA program until 2004, when President George W. Bush redirected the civilian space flight program from microgravity research in low-Earth orbit, which has been the focus of the space shuttle and International Space Station programs, to outer space exploration.

Space Plane Without a Home

NASA was told to finish station construction and retire the aging space shuttle fleet by 2010, and to develop new capsule-style spaceships that could ferry astronauts to the station and the moon. Programs that did not directly support the new initiative were chopped.

"The bottom line is that X-37 did not meet the needs any longer, from a headquarters perspective, for the exploration mission," Dan Dumbacher, the former program manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told Discovery News.