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Space plane returns from secret mission, lands at Vandenberg

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The Pentagon’s secret space plane, which has been orbiting Earth for nearly two years on a mysterious mission, landed Friday morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

The Air Force has said little about the purpose of the robotic space plane, which has been paid for through the Pentagon’s veiled “black” budget.

“It’s all very hush-hush,” said Diana Ball, a spokeswoman for Boeing, which developed the plane for the government at its Phantom Works research facilities in Huntington Beach.

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The plane, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, was launched atop an Atlas V booster from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Dec. 11, 2012.

Its covert mission has fueled speculation and conspiracy theories of what it has been doing for the last 22 months. Observers have hypothesized that the military could be using the robotic plane to deploy satellites or even to rendezvous with enemy satellites and destroy them.

But Brian Weeden, a former officer for the Air Force’s space operations, said it’s more likely that the plane has been serving some function as an orbital spy.

He said the secrecy surrounding the mission suggests that it was doing work for the National Reconnaissance Office, which is in charge of the nation’s intelligence-gathering satellites.

“We can’t tell for certain what specific countries were the focus of its collections,” said Weeden, who is now technical advisor to the Secure World Foundation, “but we can deduce a few things from the orbit.”

He said that based on the plane’s path, it could have been collecting information from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Russia would not be included, he said.

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The Air Force has said little more than it is using the plane to test experimental space technologies.

“The mission is our longest to date and we’re pleased with the incremental progress we’ve seen in our testing of the reusable space plane,” Col. Keith Balts, commander of the Air Force’s 30thSpace Wing, said in a statement after the craft touched down at 9:24 a.m.

Known as the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, the plane is less than 10 feet high, 29 feet long and has a wingspan of 15 feet. The Air Force has two of the planes, the second now in storage at Vandenberg.

This is the third mission for the two space planes -- and at 674 days, by far the longest. The craft has now outperformed its engineers’ original expectations that it could stay in orbit, fueled by the sun and lithium ion batteries, for as long as 270 days.

Future missions may not land in California.

Boeing, which has long had a Pentagon contract for the project, announced to the Florida media in January that it was refurbishing a former space shuttle hanger at the Kennedy Space Center to house the X-37B.

The release said the company would “expand its presence in Florida by adding technology, engineering and support jobs” at the Kennedy Space Center.

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The move means that “some” Boeing jobs in California are moving to Florida, Ball said this week. She declined to say how many jobs were involved, but said it was “not thousands.”

Capt. Chris Hoyler, an Air Force spokesman, said that Vandenberg would “continue to play a crucial role” in the program.

“The X-37B will have two landing options going forward,” Hoyler said, “one at Kennedy Space Center and one at Vandenberg AFB.”

Follow me on Twitter @MelodyPetersen

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