On this mission, military officials said that the X-37B tested “Space Domain Awareness Technology experiments” aimed at improving the knowledge of the Space Force about the space environment. Defense officials consider the space domain–LIke land, sea and air–A disputed environment that could become a battlefield in future conflicts.
Last month the Space Force released the first image of the earth of an X-37B in space. This image was recorded in 2024 while the spacecraft flew in its orbit at a great height and shows part of the flow-generating solar array of the X-37B.
Credit: US Space Force
The Space Force has not announced any plans for the next X-37B mission. The next X-37B flight was usually launched within one year of the landing of the previous mission. So far, all X-37B flights have been launched from Florida, with landings in Vandenberg and in Nasa's Kennedy Space Center, where Boeing and the Space Force do the space aircraft between missions.
The Aerobrakking maneuvers demonstrated by the X-37B could find requests on future operational military satellites, according to General Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command.
“De X-37 is een test- en experimentplatform, maar die aerobraking-manoeuvre heeft het toegestaan om meerdere orbitale regimes te overbruggen, en we denken dat dit precies het soort manoeuvreerbaarheid is dat we graag zouden willen zien in toekomstige systemen, die een hele nieuwe reeks operationele concepten zullen ontgrendelen,” zei Whiting in december in de Spacepower Conference van de Space Force Association.
The “astrographic” area of responsibility of Space Command (AOR) starts at the top of the atmosphere of the earth and extends to the moon and beyond.
“An irony of the space domain is that everything in our AOR is moving, but we rarely use maneuver as a way to gain positional benefit,” said Whiting. “We believe that it is vital at US Space Command, given the threats that we now see in new jobs that are difficult for us to reach, as well as the fact that the Chinese have tested on-orbit tank facility that we need a kind of persistent space maneuver.”
Improvements in maneuverability would have benefits in investigating the satellites of an opponent, as well as in defensive and attacking combat activities in a job.
The space could reach the ability for persistent maneuvers– Known in some circles as dynamic space – edits – in different ways. One is to use tank tank in the orbit with which satellites can maneuver 'without regret', and another is to pursue more more economical means to change jobs, such as aerobraking or solar electric propulsion.
Then, Whiting that Space Command could transform how it works by using “maneuvering warfare” such as the army, the navy and the Air Force. “We think we should go to a joint function of real maneuvering benefit in space.”
