A weapon that can strike anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes

That’s the message from the Air Force after last week’s launch of its X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, which can stay on orbit up to 270 days. The Air Force won’t say what, exactly, the robotic space plane will be doing there, how long it will linger this time, or even how much it costs. But the military is already in the process of building a second aircraft, which will fly next year.

[Yeah real secret: it's on the cover of my Popular Mechanics this month.]

The most likely role for the X-37B is also the most obvious: as a replacement for the classified missions once performed by the NASA Space Shuttle, which is now slated for retirement. It’s sometimes forgotten that the Space Shuttle once also carried secret payloads into orbit. But by avoiding the need for astronauts, the Air Force is able to build a smaller spacecraft dedicated solely to military missions.

Pentagon officials, for their part, are determined just to avoid the weapons issue altogether, by calling it something else. “Truthfully, I don’t know how this could be called weaponization of space,” Payton, the Air Force official, said when asked about the issue, just prior to the launch of the X-37B. “It’s just an updated version of the Space Shuttle kind of activities in space.”

READ MORE