Trump's mysterious military mini shuttle takes off in less than 48 hours

For the second time during Donald Trump's tenure, the U.S. Air Force's most mysterious aircraft will fly again. Its name is X-37B, a code name that already hints at the high degree of secrecy surrounding it. Its launch is scheduled for early morning next Saturday, May 16. It will take place at Cape Canaveral, in the state of Florida, as long as the weather conditions are favourable and no last minute technical problems arise.  

Although it has wings, the X-37B will not be taking to the skies after rolling and accelerating along a runway. It will do so housed in the top of a powerful Atlas V space launcher, which will propel it out of the Earth's atmosphere and release it into an altitude and orbit that the Pentagon's military keeps a tightly guarded secret.

Its external appearance bears great resemblance to the design of the five manned shuttles of NASA, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. Between November 1982 and July 2011 they carried hundreds of astronauts to the former Soviet orbital complex Mir and the current International Space Station and returned them to Earth. However, unlike space shuttles, the X-37B is not pilot-driven and carries no one inside. It is a robotic, reusable space plane, which travels into space on a rocket and returns independently to earth thanks to its wings. 

In essence, it is a unique mini drone space shuttle but in a mini format. It is 8.9 metres long - four times less than NASA's 24-metre-long orbiter - and weighs 4,990 kilos, 20 times less than the 100 tonnes at Columbia's launch. The mystery surrounding X-37B is that everything known about it is general and practically nothing is known about what it does in its long flights into space.

According to the U.S. Air Force, the X-37B is nothing more than a platform for conducting experiments and testing new technologies in space and returning them to earth for evaluation and analysis. So what is the significance of the May 16 space mission, with the United States in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, with nearly 85,000 dead and nearly 1.5 million people infected?

The sixth X-37B mission has been described as "critical" to national security during the national emergency period that the United States is facing because of the pandemic. The Pentagon assures that personnel involved in the launch follow protective guidelines issued by federal and Florida state health authorities, which include wearing face masks, checking body temperature, practicing physical distancing and teleworking whenever possible.

The very little information provided by the Pentagon about the cargo it carries on board and the object of the experiments and tests, together with the few images that exist of the mini shuttle, suggest that it also carries out tests related to weapons systems. Even more so if we consider that its manufacturer is Boeing, an industrial corporation dedicated to the development of aerospace and defense systems.

It has been known that, on this occasion, the X-37B will carry a test in its small cargo hold consisting of firing microwaves, a technology that could be oriented to complete the development of an electromagnetic weapon. This is a test by the Naval Research Laboratory, which aims to transform solar energy into radio frequency microwaves, which could then be directed towards the earth or other objects in space.

It is a practical evaluation with clear military application, since there are agencies and companies working for the Pentagon in the development of weapons capable of generating and firing microwave pulses, electromagnetic waves that depending on their degree of intensity and power can cause destructive effects, especially on electronic equipment of ballistic missiles.

The OTV-6 mission also incorporates totally secret tests of which nothing is known and two NASA experiments to study radiation and other effects on a plate of materials and seeds. It also includes a satellite called FalconSat-8, built by Air Force Academy cadets, which will host five experiments and will be released into space.

The little information that has been officially released, intentionally leaked or discovered indicates that the robotic space plane is being used as a priority platform for testing new technologies before they are installed and declared operational. They are mostly aimed at lightening the weight and improving the performance of military spy satellite sensors, new operational concepts and advanced weapon systems. These are usually improved guidance, navigation and automatic control equipment, new avionics and high-temperature resistant thermal protection materials, reusable insulation, advanced propulsion systems and advanced components.

The X-37B is a space plane owned by the US Air Force. However, it is the Space Force created by Trump on December 20, 2019, that assumes responsibility and management of launch activities, in-orbit operations and landing. The mission scheduled to take off in less than 48 hours is the seventh of the newly created Space Force, so it is also called USSF-7, an acronym for United States Space Force 7.

Officially called the Orbital Test Vehicle or OTV, the development of the X-37B was approved during the second term of President Bill Clinton and ratified by his successors, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump. Its first operational mission (OTV-1) began on April 22, 2010 and lasted until December 3, totaling 224 days in orbit, beating all records for permanence in space.

Since then and for the space of 10 years it has only made four more flights, surpassing in each of them its record of stay in orbit. The last one was the OTV-5 mission, which took off on September 7, 2017 and returned to earth on October 27, 2019, no less than 779 days in space... more than two years in orbit!

The fact that an Atlas V rocket is used without additional boosters to add momentum to the take-off and first seconds of the ascent flight means that the height at which the X-37B is to be placed is not very high. Dutch astronomer Ralf Vandebergh discovered the X-37B on 2 July last year at an altitude of 339 kilometres below the International Space Station, which orbits just under 400 kilometres above the Earth.