Spaceplanes

The US Air Force has successfully launched its Atlas V rocket, carrying a X-37B space plane for a secretive mission.

The rocket launched on Sunday from Cape Canaveral, a day after bad weather halted plans for a Saturday launch.

The aircraft, also known as an Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), will deploy a satellite into orbit and also test power-beaming technology.

Space tourism no longer looks that far. At this point, 573 is the number of people who flied into the space, but projections suggest that it will increase many times over. Over time, it seems more and more realistic that not only the wealthiest will be able to live out what has been reserved for seriously trained astronauts for decades.

DARPA’s ambitious launch-a-day spaceplane is a step closer to lift off after Boeing announced that it’s been assigned the contract to work with the agency to design, build and test a technology demonstration vehicle for the Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program.

The U.S. military’s experimental X-37B space plane landed on Sunday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years, the Air Force said.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said it had launched on Feb. 11 a prototype craft designed to return to Earth at the end of its mission, a key goal in space strategy.
      
A Vega rocket lifted off from ESA's base in Kourou, French Guiana at 1340 GMT bearing the novel craft, the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV), ESA said in a webcast.
      

Authorities who carried out their first full day of investigation into a US spacecraft crash that killed one pilot and seriously injured another Nov. 1 said probing the incident could take a year.
      

A hypersonic weapon being developed by the U.S. military was destroyed four seconds after its launch from a test range in Alaska early on Aug. 25 after controllers detected a problem with the system, the Pentagon said.
   
The weapon is part of a program to create a missile that will destroy targets anywhere on Earth within an hour of getting data and permission to launch.