14 DAY TRIAL // Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of every single orbital exploration mission started by Terra, secret or otherwise. Or at least that's how our report would start as if we could actually claim to know about all space projects in the world.
Unfortunately, while most satellite launches and space shuttles are known to the public, there are certain secret missions that get started from time to time.
Some of them never come to light, and others make the news so suddenly that you wonder what the world has been doing without your knowledge.
The other day, one such secret mission came to an end, and it wasn't some fiery conclusion or anything else of the sort. Fortunately, not everything ends in drama or explosions as Hollywood would have done it.
Instead, a certain orbital test vehicle landed at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California yesterday, October 17, 2014.
The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle mission 3 (OTV-3)
The mission was launched back in 2012, on October 25, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. An Atlas/Centaur rocket carried the vehicle beyond most of the atmosphere.
The X-37B isn't a space shuttle though. Those things can only get back to Earth through atmospheric reentry that always ends in (hopefully) controlled crashes in the ocean.
Instead, the X-37B is an honest to heavens orbital plane. That's right, for the past two years the USA has been conducting some secret mission in space.
The details weren't shared, but the OTV-3 was supposedly a test run only, for whatever it was. And since the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is supposed to be reusable, it might end up in space again, at some point. The plane spent 674 days in orbit, which is a record setting period. There was no crew though. The plane is an example of unmanned spacecraft.
The ambiguous role of the OTV-3 mission
The US Air Force claims that the X-37B was designed for experimentation, risk reduction and concept of operations development. Which, of course, tells us absolutely nothing. The nature of the OTV-3 mission is still a secret.
The OTV-4 mission is being prepared now, to take off from Cape Canaveral in 2015. Unfortunately, we don't know any more about it than we do about the OTV-3, and no one seems to be willing to divulge anything specific. Maybe they're monitoring aliens, or other countries' activities involving aliens that may or may not have showed up there instead of the US.
Or maybe they're just trial runs for an eventual tourist spacecraft. It's about time someone explored the concept.