Boeing’s X-37B Military Space Plane Spends Record 908 Days in Orbit

The US Air Force’s experimental autonomous space plane has just set a new endurance record by spending 908 days in orbit. The previous record was 719 days.

The X-37B(Opens in a new window) orbital test vehicle (OTV) successfully landed(Opens in a new window) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida early on Saturday morning. It’s only the space plane’s sixth mission, but it has already racked up over 1.3 billion miles of flight time and spent 3,774 days in space.

During this latest record-setting flight, the X-37B carried a service module for the first time containing a number of experiments. They included a solar energy experiment by the Naval Research Lab, a NASA Materials Exposure and Technology Innovation in Space (METIS-2) experiment focusing on space exposure for various materials, and another NASA experiment to see how space exposure affected seeds. The module separated from the OTV before it de-orbited to ensure a safe landing.

The X-37B launched on its sixth mission back in 2020 carrying FalconSat-8 satellite for the Air Force Research Laboratory. It was successfully deployed in Oct. 2021 and remains in orbit today.

The experimental space plane was created through a partnership between the US Department of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office and the US Space Force, with Boeing handling design and manufacturing. It’s designed to operate in low-earth orbit at between 150 and 500 miles above Earth, traveling at 17,426 mph, and was initially only expected to complete flights of up to 270 days.

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