Air Force's Top Secret Space Plane X-37 Celebrates One Year In Orbit

The X-37B just celebrated its birthday. The top secret space plane of the United States Air Force has successfully completes one year in orbit, according to reports.

The secretive space plane embarked on its first mission in April 2010, followed by two more stints in 2011 and 2012, each of which lasted more than a year. The recent first year anniversary celebrates the success of X-37B's fourth mission, and at present there are no announced plans yet of landing back the plane on Earth. Official representatives reportedly told the Air Force Times that they were looking excitedly looking forward to the aircraft's latest mission and learn from it.

The mission and work of the X-37B is highly mysterious and the Air Force has always been reluctant to speak about the space plane's actual agenda. The usual statements made by the officials include demonstration of reusable space technologies and craft testing motives like ""advanced guidance, navigation and control, thermal protection systems, avionics, high temperature structures and seals, conformal reusable insulation, lightweight electromechanical flight systems, advanced propulsion systems, and autonomous orbital flight, reentry, and landing".

However, experts have pointed out that the secretive space plane is probably used for examining systems to damage enemy satellites or quickly replace impaired US satellites.  On its part, the Air Force did not reveal any details about the fourth mission of the X-37B, let alone tell whether the course of its flight had any different purpose than the three previous ones. Incidentally, there are two X-37B aircraft built by Boeing Network & Space Systems, and each measures 29 feet in length, 9 feet in height, has a wingspan of 14-foot and weighs around 4990 kilograms.

The X-37 space plane program had initially started at NASA before being handed over to the Pentagon in 2004. The unmanned spacecraft is also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) and it is reusable.