The Air Force is preparing for the Atlas V launch in December of the first U.S. robotic military spaceplane mission into orbit.

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle flight will mark a fundamental technology milestone for the Air Force. It will carry on winged hypersonic space vehicle technology as the space shuttle is canceled. This work is designed to propel the Air Force mission more rapidly - to where the blue sky turns to black - using a reusable hypersonic craft serviced on the ground just like an airplane.

In the future, this could lead to military spaceplane capability for the same kind of rapid access to the blackness of space that the Air Force already has to the blue sky - for the same offensive and defensive missions, including intelligence, strike and communications services to the military as a whole.

The 11,000-lb. Boeing Phantom Works vehicle is about 29 ft. long with a roughly 15-ft. wingspan; the vehicle height is 9.6 ft. Its 205-ft.-tall Atlas V 501 booster will lift off from Launch Complex 41 here on 1 million lb. thrust. The 501 version with no solid rocket motors can carry up to 10.6 tons to low Earth orbit. The orbital test vehicle will be carried under a shroud on the United Launch Alliance booster.

Once in orbit, the spacecraft will open a small payload bay and deploy a gallium arsenide solar array to power its flight. The exact mission duration is classified.

The X-37B is designed for multiple missions, moving X-plane flight testing into space from the ground.

A landing is planned at the space shuttle runway at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., according to U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mark W. Brown in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Touchdown should occur after some weeks in orbit demonstrating the new computational and other technologies of the Space Maneuvering Vehicle (SMV). The shuttle runway at Edwards AFB, Calif., could be an alternate landing site.

The touchdown will involve a steep 20-deg., 170-190-kt. diving shuttle-type approach similar to that used in helicopter drop tests with a subscale X-40 vehicle and the more complex X-37A.

The X-37B is to test advanced thermal protection materials, autonomous approach and landing schemes, and orbital and ground operations.

The U.S. Air Force Space Command and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will control the flight. The project was taken over by Darpa when NASA dropped its collaboration with the Air Force in 2004 after the space agency determined that it was much more a military than a joint civil/military endeavor. The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, however, has done extensive work on the program.