The Pentagon is usually scant on any details about the X-37B, its top secret space plane that flies up to 500 miles above Earth. But the Department of Defense has now revealed that the unmanned craft is about to execute a'first-of-a-kind' manoeuvre to alter its orbit. It's thought the novel exercise will let it evade detection by hostile nations and perform secretive'low-passes' over Earth. The Boeing-built vehicle, roughly the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, has been launched seven times since 2010. Although the exact purpose of the ship is a guarded secret by the US Space Force, it's thought to carry spy equipment, satellites or even weaponry. X-37 is a reusable robotic spacecraft manufactured by Boeing for the US government.

SpaceX has said it has earmarked December 28 for the launch of the United States military's X-37B robot space plane on its seventh mission to orbit. "Now targeting no earlier than Thursday, December 28 for the Falcon Heavy to launch USSF-52 to orbit from Florida," SpaceX said in a post on X on Friday, after it delayed the launch earlier this week to perform additional system checks. The original plan to send the spacecraft to orbit late on Sunday was scrubbed due to poor weather conditions at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The delays came on what was to have been the seventh mission flown by the unmanned X-37B, and its first launch atop a Falcon Heavy, composed of three reusable rocket cores strapped together and capable of lofting the vehicle far higher in orbit than ever before. Roughly the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle craft, the X-37B is built to deploy various payloads and conduct technology experiments in long-duration orbital flights.

China plans to open its new space station up to'tourism' within the next decade - sparking what the country hopes is a race to compete with the likes of private American space tourists such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson. China launched its Tiangong space station in 2021 - its first long-term space station project - with the final modules set to launch later this year. The country's announcement also comes as China continues to produce new billionaires at a blistering pace - much faster than any other nation on Earth. While there were no specific details included to determine what the future of space tourism in China will look like, officials have said it is likely that people without formal astronaut training could be launched into orbit'relatively soon.' Yang Liwei, who became the first Chinese astronaut back in 2003, said tourists visiting Tiangong'is not a matter of technology but of demand.' China is also thought to be working on a more tourist-friendly reusable spacecraft that could take up to seven astronauts at a time into space.

The U.S. Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane has now spent 600 days in Earth orbit on the vessel's latest mission, and is nearing a program record for longest time spent in space. The robotic X-37B lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 20, 2015, kicking off the program's fourth space mission (which is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-4, or OTV-4). If the uncrewed spacecraft spends 74 more days aloft, it will break the duration record set during OTV-3, which touched down in October 2014. But it's unclear how long OTV-4 will last, or just what the X-37B is doing as it circles Earth; most details about the space plane's missions and payloads are classified. The first OTV mission began on April 22, 2010, and concluded on Dec. 3 of that year, following 224 days of orbit.

Instead of catching a ride into the upper atmosphere like SpaceShipTwo, its predecessor SpaceShipOne, or NASA's X-15 rocket place, China's space plane as intended will launch vertically from the ground, like the retired Space Shuttle and Buran, its Soviet clone. Two other spaceplanes, the Air Force's mysterious unmanned X-37B robot and the unmanned version of Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser both are designed to ride to space on the top of rockets, jettisoning the booster stages as they clear gravity. Unlike the Shuttle or the X037B, the smaller version of China's space plane will carry all its fuel internally, and the concept seems to lack booster rockets. The larger space plane will use a single booster add-on, carrying it farther into space. The most successful spaceplane currently flying is a military robot.

The U.S. military's plans to build a satellite-launching robotic space plane are moving forward. On May 23, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out its official call for proposals for the futuristic space plane design. The goal of the Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) project is to build a reusable space plane that, at optimal operation, should be able to fly 10 times in 10 days, at a cost of no more than 5 million per flight. Typically, space vehicles are not fully reusable, and the pieces that are reused need to undergo time-consuming safety checks between flights. XS-1 would be used primarily as a cheap and fast way to deliver satellites to orbit, DARPA officials said.