America's X-37B robot spaceplane blasts off from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for secretive mission - two weeks after China launched its own 'Divine Dragon' space drone

The US military's secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday 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 liquid-fueled rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast. The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays attributed to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday's flight. It came two weeks after China's own robot spaceplane, the Shenlong, or'Divine Dragon,' was launched on its third mission to orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing US-Sino rivalry in space. The Pentagon has disclosed scant details about the X-37B mission, conducted by the US Space Force under the military's National Security Space Launch program.