To date, the company has apparently built two X-37B space planes for the U.S. (DARPA did construct and test the ALTV, however.) Boeing has been the primary contractor for the X-37B program dating back to its inception in 1999. The design of the space plane was based heavily on the original OV, which was never built. In 2006, the Air Force announced it would develop its own X-37 vehicle, which it dubbed the X-37B, or OTV. But NASA transferred X-37 development to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2004, at which point it became a classified program. The X-37 program started in 1999 with NASA, which initially planned to develop two separate vehicles: an Approach and Landing Test Vehicle (ALTV) and an Orbital Vehicle (OV). Like the space shuttle, the X-37B lands on a runway, plane-style, but does everything autonomously (in contrast to the piloted shuttle, which usually carried a crew of seven astronauts). The X-37B has ridden to orbit atop two different boosters to date - United Launch Alliance's Atlas V and SpaceX's Falcon 9. Indeed, the X-37B's designers originally envisioned the shuttle carrying the smaller space plane to orbit but ultimately decided that launching the X-37B atop a rocket would be more economical. The now-retired space shuttle orbiters, by contrast, were 122 feet (37 m) long and measured more than 78 feet (24 m) from wingtip to wingtip.Two X-37Bs could fit inside the shuttle's cavernous payload bay. The X-37B is just 29 feet (8.8 meters) long, with a wingspan of 15 feet (4.6 m). The X-37B looks a lot like NASA's iconic space shuttle, but the two types of vehicles don't resemble each other in size.
(Image credit: AIAA/Grantz/Boeing) 1) It's tiny
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