The U.S. military’s secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday (December 28) night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than ever before.
The Falcon Heavy, composed of three rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular nighttime liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast. Following the X-37B’s launch, the Falcon’s side boosters returned safely to earth.
The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays. Three earlier countdowns were aborted due to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday’s fight.
The Pentagon has disclosed few details about the X-37B mission, which is conducted by the U.S. Space Force under the military’s National Security Space Launch program. SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy X-37B spaceplane during secretive mission.
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