And You Thought The Space Shuttle Program Was Finished

I thought I would add to this article my own Florida viewpoint on this.  I've seen at least 3 launches of the XR-37B, all between the spring and fall of 2011.  It is taken up on the back of a military transport, released, then it engages the rockets to obtain orbit.  The firing of the rockets is visible for about 5 to 10 seconds before it quickly dims.  These can lift off from any military base as well as Cape Canaveral and the launch site on Wallops Island, Virginia. Two points to make in all of this.

First, the space program is officially going military, but it was always in control of the military.  The only thing civilian about NASA was a few of it's scientists and contractors.  There are many things that happened in the official NASA program that were never disclosed to the public.  I hope to share some of those things in coming months.

The second point is that space has become militarized, a true battlefield, and not all of that is from satellites.  For every project we hear about, like this one, there are probably five that no one has heard of, and few have seen.  We should be aware of this because the Lord warned in the last days that there would be "fearful sights and great signs from heaven".  (Luke 21:11)

  

The US Air Force's second mysterious mini-space shuttle, the X-37B, could be spying on China's space laboratory and the first piece of its space station, Tiangong-1.
Amateur space trackers told the British Interplanetary Society publication Spaceflight that the black-funded spaceplane seemed to be orbiting the Earth in tandem with Tiangong_1, or the Heavenly Palace, leading the magazine to speculate that its unknown mission is to spy on it
"Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China's nascent space station," Spaceflight editor Dr David Baker told the BBC.

America has refused to come clean on exactly what the X-37Bs are meant to be doing up there, but the line on the plane has always been that it's a test prototype of a reusable spacecraft that can carry experiments into and back from space.
According to the Air Force's fact sheet on the project, which was funded from the classified budget:

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is the newest and most advanced re-entry spacecraft. Based on NASA's X-37 design, the unmanned OTV is designed for vertical launch to low Earth orbit altitudes where it can perform long duration space technology experimentation and testing.
Upon command from the ground, the OTV autonomously re-enters the atmosphere, descends and lands horizontally on a runway.

As well as being winged for re-entry, the OTV also has a strong heat shield, both perfectly in tune with the (vaguely) stated purpose of the craft.
However since people don't even know how much the things cost, exactly where either one was headed and with what payload when they took off in April 2010 and March 2011 respectively, or for how long they're supposed to be up there, it's assumed the spacecraft have naturally been assigned some sort of clandestine military purpose.
The doomsayers in the Iranian media dubbed the X-37B a "secret space warplane" before the first one went up, adding that it was the first generation of US space Predator drones that would build up the US' space armada.
Slightly less alarmist is the hypothesis suggested by El Reg and others that the mini-space shuttle's purpose has something to do with spy satellites. That could be a spot of sat-napping - grabbing or disabling other countries' satellites while leaving the owners to assume some sort of space accident. Or it could be picking up their own eye-poppingly expensive sats for repair or recycling back at home.