For a glimpse of how the U.S. military is redefining its presence in space, take a look at the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle. This diminutive, unmanned spaceplane—half-spacecraft, half-miniature shuttle—is quietly one of the most sophisticated and enigmatic weapons in the Space Force’s arsenal. Few thought it would assume such prominence, but today it is at the core of America’s new space strategy.
Its seventh flight, OTV-7, put another page into the vehicle’s storied history. For the first time, the vehicle flew into a highly elliptical orbit, flying much higher than usual at its apogee. This created new possibilities for testing new maneuvers and pushing the limits of what can be done for the X-37B.
Among its most notable accomplishments was a technique called aerobraking. Instead of blasting fuel to change course, the spaceplane used the thin upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere to slow down and change orbit. The technique, often employed on deep-space flights to destinations like Mars, had not been attempted by the X-37B until now.
The military benefit is self-evident: the ability to reposition without warning renders the vehicle harder to track, giving it a stealthy presence in space. The maneuver was likened by former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson once to a submarine hugging a thermal layer to evade sonar, forcing competitors to scout anew from scratch.
But OTV-7 was more than clever tactics. The mission also carried a payload of experiments to increase space domain awareness—the capacity to see and know what is happening in Earth’s crowded orbital space.
The flight tested new sensors and tracking systems that can monitor satellites, space debris, and potential threats, all of which are growing more important as space becomes more crowded.
NASA also added an investigation element with its Seeds-2 test, looking at how seeds survive prolonged exposure to cosmic rays. Its conclusions may eventually help long-duration missions, where growing food in space could become crucial to sustaining human crews’ survival.
Spending more than 14 months—434 days in total—on its first flight, the X-37B returned safely to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The time alone was a testament to its endurance, but being able to take off and land from various locations highlighted its flexibility as an asset with extended use.
OTV-7 lesson is not hard to discern: the X-37B has become a development testbed for the technologies that will form the space operations of the future. Autonomous flight control to secure communications is laying the foundations that extend well beyond the military.
As Boeing vice president of space mission systems, Michelle Parker explained, the advancements shown by the X-37B will have a snowball effect, shaping not only defense initiatives but the overall quest for sustainable space exploration.
With OTV-7, the X-37B showed that the U.S. is not only keeping pace with the demands of space—it is leading the way to the future, incrementally, on stealthy missions.