Secret U.S. Space Plane Glides Back to Earth--And, Thankfully, Even the WikiLeaks Crackpots Don't Know What It Was Doing

The mysterious, 220-day mission of the unmanned X-37B space plane came to a quiet end on Friday.

The U.S. Air Force developed this secretive mission with the Orbital Test Vehicle 1 (OTV-1), better known as the X-37B space plane...

It is a robotic winged craft, with no humans onboard, that looks somewhat similar to the more familiar space shuttles Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery.

The X-37B space plane is about nine meters (29 feet) in length, has a wingspan of about four meters (14 feet), and has a height of approximately three meters (9.5 feet)... [and weighs] about 11,000 pounds...

It landed on a runway at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, at approximately 1:16 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST), after its first trip into space...

Its mission is Top Secret, but speculation is rife about its true operational characteristics. Among the use-cases:

• Launch anti-satellite explosives
• MAHEM - send a stream of super-heated molten metal into other space vehicles
• Direct tactical lasers and microwaves
• Launch microsatellite or nanosatellites that attach themselves to enemy satellites to disable or coopt them
• Launch and detonate e-bombs (small, directed EMP explosions) to kill enemy electronics
• Drop tungsten rods on Earth-borne targets from space ("Rods from God")

In the latter case, try imagining a telephone pole hitting Osama Bin Laden at 7,000 MPH.

Faster, please.


Images and Schematic: Space.com.