On this day in space! April 22, 2010: X-37B space plane launches on 1st top-secret mission

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On April 22, 2010, the U.S. Air Force launched the super-secret X-37B space plane on its first spaceflight.

On April 22, 2010, the U.S. Air Force launched the super-secret X-37B space plane on its first spaceflight.

Russia's Saylut 1, the world's first space station, is seen during preparations for its April 19, 1971 launch in this undated photo from the Russian space agency Roscosmos. (Image credit: Boeing Space)

The X-37B has flown several highly classified payloads on long-duration missions. For its first flight, the X-37B launched on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral and it orbited the Earth for 224 days. The Air Force never disclosed what kind of experiments were going on during that time.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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