The US military’s spaceplane is about to fly again—it needs a bigger rocket

The exact altitude the X-37B will be flying through is unclear, but hobbyists and amateur sleuths who use open source information to reconstruct trajectories of top-secret military spacecraft suggest the Falcon Heavy will haul the winged vehicle into an orbit that could stretch tens of thousands of miles above the planet.

What’s more, the Falcon Heavy will apparently take a flight path toward the northeast from Florida’s Space Coast, then ultimately release the X-37B on a trajectory that will take it over Earth’s polar regions. This is a significant departure from the flight profile for the military spaceplane’s six previous missions, which all flew to space on smaller rockets than the Falcon Heavy.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/spacex-looks-primed-to-launch-military-spaceplane-higher-than-ever-before/

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