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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] An unmanned X-37B space plane landed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, wrapping up a record 780 days in orbit, the US Air Force said Sunday. The mission breaks the mysterious plane's own record by spending more than two years in space.
[...] Altogether, the program, which has at least two of the reusable planes, has spent 2,865 days in space over the course of five missions, the Air Force said. The fifth mission launched on Sept. 7, 2017.
The Boeing-built space planes resemble a smaller version of NASA's old space shuttles and have a similar re-entry trajectory that uses a runway, like the old shuttles. They feature a small payload bay and use a deployable solar array for power.
The 11,000-pound vehicle is about 29 feet long with a wingspan of just under 15 feet and was designed to stay in orbit for 270 days. It was originally a NASA program, with roots in the space agency's lifting-body research, that ran from 1999 to 2004. The X-37B is designed to serve as a platform for experiments and to offer insights on transporting satellite sensors and other equipment to and from space.
[ed: Nuked dead link on "originally a NASA program' —chromas]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 29 2019, @12:56AM
Just like the Russian capsule dwellers, keeping a reusable spacecraft healthy for 780 days is a learning experience in and of itself. While it's up there it no doubt is doing other things, but maybe the most important aspect of the mission is just learning what glitches in the systems and how to deal with that.
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