The U.S. Department of Defense’s reusable X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) has embarked on its eighth overall flight into orbit. Vehicle 1, the first X-37B to fly, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on Thursday, Aug. 21, at 11:50 PM EDT (03:50 UTC on Friday, Aug. 22).
The launch window was just under four hours long and lasted until 3:40 AM EDT (07:40 UTC) on Friday morning. After liftoff, Falcon 9 followed a northeast trajectory to loft the X-37B into a low-Earth orbit, possibly a circular orbit at 500 km altitude inclined 49.5 degrees to the equator. The Orbital Test Vehicle 8 (OTV-8) mission will spend an unspecified amount of time in orbit, with missions lasting hundreds of days in orbit before landing on a runway.
20250821: NSF.
No comments:
Post a Comment