A secret U.S. spaceplane has returned to Earth after two years. But nobody knows what it was doing in space

One of the Pentagon’s best-kept secrets has returned to Earth after spending two years in space, according to the U.S. air force. However, any results or data from the mission are, well, a secret.

The X-37B spaceplane landed on an air strip at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:51 a.m. local time on Sunday, after spending 780 days in orbit, wrote the U.S. air force in a jargon-heavy statement.

The mission marked the fifth time the plane — the size of a small bus — has been launched into orbit, under the so-called Orbit Test Vehicle program, since it was launched in 2010.

Yet no one outside of the U.S. air force appears to know anything about why it was launched, or what it even does while in space.

According to the statement, the X-37B program “performs risk reduction, experimentation and concept of operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies.” As the plane is unmanned, it is also possible to test technologies in a “long-duration space environment,”
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