SpaceX launches secret military shuttle as Hurricane Irma approaches

Elon Musk’s aerospace firm SpaceX has launched a secret military shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, days before Hurricane Irma is expected to hit the state.

One of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets carried an experimental “mini-shuttle capable of spending years in orbit” into space, says The Guardian.

Two versions of these autonomous shuttles, called X-37Bs, are known to exist, the newspaper reports. The US Air Force says the test programme is used to develop “reusable” and “unmanned” spacecraft to increase the frequency of spaceflight.

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However, Alphr says “it doesn’t take a large stretch of the imagination to guess that the US is also testing surveillance technologies”.

SpaceX went ahead with the launch “despite warnings that the weather was only 50% favourable” due to the Hurricane Irma, says Fortune. The storm was 900 miles away from the Kennedy Space Center at the time.

Following the launch, Sky News says, the Falcon 9 successfully returned to Earth so that in can be re-used for missions in the future, but it will need to be moved quickly before Hurricane hits.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket gained military accreditation in May 2015, but according to Bloomberg this was the first time Musk's company has sent an X-37B into orbit.