- The camera is designed to continuously observe a portion of the sky to detect moving objects in space. A special software program helps identify known and unknown objects.
A sleuthing enthusiast says he found the US military’s X-37B spaceplane
Officials didn't disclose details about the X-37B's orbit after its December launch.
It turns out some of the informed speculation about the US military's latest X-37B spaceplane mission was pretty much spot-on.
When the semi-classified winged spacecraft launched on December 28, it flew into orbit on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which is much larger than the Atlas V and Falcon 9 rockets used to launch the X-37B on its previous missions.
This immediately sparked speculation that the X-37B would reach higher altitudes than its past flights, which remained in low-Earth orbit at altitudes of a few hundred miles. A discovery from Tomi Simola, a satellite tracking hobbyist living near Helsinki, Finland, appears to confirm this suspicion.
On Friday, Simola reported on social media and on SeeSat-L, a long-running online forum of satellite tracking enthusiasts, that he detected an unidentified object using a sky-watching camera. The camera is designed to continuously observe a portion of the sky to detect moving objects in space. A special software program helps identify known and unknown objects.
"Exciting news!" Simola posted on social media. "Orbital Test Vehicle 7 (OTV-7), which was launched to classified orbit last December, was seen by my SatCam! Here are images from the last two nights!"
Mike McCants, one of the more experienced satellite observers and co-administrator of the SeeSat-L forum, agreed with Simola's conclusion that he found the X-37B spaceplane.
"Congrats to Tomi Simola for locating the secret X-37B spaceplane," posted Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and widely respected expert in spaceflight activity.
Higher than ever
Amateur observations of the spaceplane indicate it is flying in a highly elliptical orbit ranging between 201 and 24,133 miles in altitude (323 and 38,838 kilometers). The orbit is inclined 59.1 degrees to the equator.
This is not far off the predictions from the hobbyist tracking community before the launch in December. At that time, enthusiasts used information about the Falcon Heavy's launch trajectory and drop zones for the rocket's core booster and upper stage to estimate the orbit it would reach with the X-37B spaceplane.
The Space Force has not released any information about the orbit of the X-37B. While it took hobbyists about six weeks to find the X-37B on this mission, it typically took less time for amateur trackers to locate it when it orbited at lower altitudes on its previous missions. Despite the secrecy, it's difficult to imagine the US military's adversaries in China and Russia didn't already know where the spaceplane was flying.
Military officials usually don't disclose details about the X-37B's missions while they are in space, providing updates only before each launch and then after each landing.
This is the seventh flight of an X-3B spaceplane since the first one launched in 2010. In a statement before the launch in December, the Space Force said this flight of the X-37B is focused on "a wide range of test and experimentation objectives." Flying in "new orbital regimes" is among the test objectives, military officials said.
The military has two Boeing-built X-37B spaceplanes, or Orbital Test Vehicles, in its inventory. They are reusable and designed to launch inside the payload fairing of a conventional rocket, spend multiple years in space with the use of solar power, and then return to Earth for a landing on a three-mile-long runway, either at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California or at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It resembles a miniature version of NASA's retired space shuttle orbiter, with wings, deployable landing gear, and black thermal protection tiles to shield its belly from the scorching heat of reentry. It measures 29 feet (about 9 meters) long, roughly a quarter of the length of NASA's space shuttle, and it doesn't carry astronauts.
The X-37B has a cargo bay inside the fuselage for payloads, with doors that open after launch and close before landing. There is also a service module mounted to the back end of the spaceplane to accommodate additional experiments, payloads, and small satellites that can deploy in orbit to perform their own missions.
All the Space Force has said about the payloads on the current X-37B flight is that its experiment package includes investigations into new "space domain awareness technologies." NASA is flying an experiment on the X-37B to measure how plant seeds respond to sustained exposure to space radiation. The spaceplane's orbit on this flight takes it through the Van Allen radiation belts.
The secrecy surrounding the X-37B has sparked much speculation about its purpose, some of which centers on ideas that the spaceplane is part of a classified weapons platform in orbit. More likely, analysts say, the X-37B is a testbed for new space technologies. The unusual elliptical orbit for this mission is similar to the orbit used for some of the Space Force's satellites designed to detect and warn of ballistic missile launches.
McDowell said this could mean the X-37B is testing out an infrared sensor for future early warning satellites, but then he cautioned this would be "just a wild speculation."
Speculation is about all we have to go on regarding the X-37B. But it seems we no longer need to speculate about where the X-37B is flying.
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SpaceX launches Starlink batch on final mission of 2023, nails landing
SpaceX's 97th launch overall for this year marked the seventh flight for X-37B, but the first time the space plane hitched a lift atop a Falcon Heavy rocket.
SpaceX capped off 2023 with not one but two rocket launches, bringing its total number of
- That blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 GMT on Dec. 29).
- This marked the second Falcon Heavy flight of 2023.
Second up on the launch docket for Thursday, hours later, was a Falcon 9 liftoff carrying 23 SpaceX Starlink units to low Earth orbit from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
- This launch took place at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 GMT on Dec. 29).
- This was SpaceX's 98th and final launch of 2023, and the 96th flight for a Falcon 9 rocket this year.
Related: SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches mysterious X-37B space plane for US Space Force after delays
SpaceX's 97th launch overall for this year marked the seventh flight for X-37B, but the first time the space plane hitched a lift atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. The X-37B/Falcon Heavy launch had been scrubbed several times previously due to bad weather and an issue with ground equipment.
The launch of 23 Starlink broadband satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida that capped off 2023 was also the 96th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket during this year.
SpaceX also posted images of this launch to its X feed.
SpaceX's next launch is targeted for Jan. 2, 2024 and will see a further 21 Starlink satellites lift to orbit to join the over 5,500 internet supplying units currently orbiting Earth.
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Look At An X-37B In Space With An Extended Payload Module
Space Force’s secretive X-37B just launched on its seventh mission, which will be its most ambitious, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy rocket.
Boeing and SpaceX have shared footage of U.S. Space Force’s secretive X-37B mini-shuttles in space with a payload-laden service module attached. A brief video clip showing the X-37B with the module separating from its launch rocket after being lofted into space in 2020 was included in a video montage shown ahead of the latest launch of an X-37B yesterday. You can find out more about what we can expect from the new X-37B mission in The War Zone's previous reporting.
SpaceX broadcast the video montage that included the clip in question just minutes before a Falcon Heavy rocket with an X-37B on top blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last night. User @DutchSpace on X, formerly known as Twitter, was among the first to spot the clip of the X-37B separating into space.
The montage begins at approximately 3:38 in the runtime of the video seen below.
Boeing previously released the footage of the service module-equipped X-37B in space, but it was not widely disseminated. The War Zone reached out to Boeing, which designed and built the two X-37Bs, originally for the U.S. Air Force, and continues to provide contractor support for the spaceplanes, as well as SpaceX, for more information. Boeing subsequently directed us to contact the U.S. Space Force for more details.
The rendering in the social media post from Boeing below (parts of which are also in the montage that SpaceX broadcast during its live stream) also shows exactly where in the launch sequence the footage of the service module-equipped X-37B in space comes from. The spaceplane is notably depicted here without the module.
The footage of the service module-equipped X-37B in space is from the start of the record-setting Orbital Test Vehicle 6 (OTV-6) mission, which began on May 17, 2020, and ended 908 days (nearly two and a half years) later on November 12, 2022. For OTV-6, the module is known to have been used to launch the U.S. Air Force Academy's FalconSat-8, a small cubesat, which can also be seen in the footage. You can read more about what is known about the OTV-6 mission here.
U.S. Space Force and Boeing only released the first pictures of the service module, including ones showing FalconSat-8 and other payloads loaded onto it, after the conclusion of the OTV-6 mission last year.
Boeing previously released similar footage of an X-37B without the service module separating from its launch rocket during the OTV-1 mission, which began on April 22, 2010, and ended on December 3 of that year.
Much about the X-37Bs and their missions do remain highly classified, which has led to much speculation, including about their potential use as space-based intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance (ISR) or weapons platforms. The War Zone has explored what is known about these spaceplanes and their capabilities in depth in the past.
The X-37B's latest mission, known as OTV-7, is as shadowy as ever. SpaceX pointedly did not provide any footage of the second stage of the Falcon Heavy containing spaceplane after launch, which a company representative said during the live stream was "at our customer's request."
Last night's launch, also known as USSF-52, was also the first time one of these spaceplanes has been put into orbit using a Falcon Heavy rocket. This would allow it to be placed in a much higher orbit than on previous missions, as The War Zone previously explored.
Space Force had already disclosed that OTV-7 will "include operating the reusable spaceplane in new orbital regimes" and there have been other indications that the mission could take the X-37B beyond the so-called geostationary orbit (GEO) belt around the Earth, as you can read more about here. The GEO belt is defined as being around 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above sea level. Orbits that take spacecraft beyond the GEO belt are categorized as high earth orbits (HEO).
The U.S. government-operated website Space-Track.org has last night's launch its database (where the X-37B being used on the OTV-7 mission has also now been logged as USA 349), but no details about its orbit are provided.
What the OTV-7 orbit might look like remains unclear and it could also change significantly over the course of the mission. The X-37B is highly maneuverable and the spaceplanes have been observed changing their positions during previous missions. Reports in the past have suggested that the X-37B may be able to rapidly redirect itself by dipping one of its wings into Earth's atmosphere as it passes by.
Pennsylvania-headquartered private space surveillance firm COMSPOC had released a video showing a notional HEO scenario ahead of the launch. Bob Hall, COMSPOC's Director of Operations Integration, explained to The War Zone that this model was based on publicly available information. This includes warning notices to aviators and mariners about the impending launch and a previously released requirements document that mentioned OTV-7 and a requirement "to lift a certain mass to a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO)."
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