The United States Air Force spaceplane, the X-37B, landed at the Kennedy Space Center after spending 780 days in orbit.
A spaceplane is a vehicle which can move like a plane in Earth’s orbit and like a spacecraft in space.
The craft was launched into orbit by a carrier rocket and spent it’s time circling Earth powered by solar energy.
It was designed to spend 270 days in orbit but shattered that mark. It’s purpose was to test reusable space tech.
This got me thinking. Because of relativity, clocks on Earth move slower than ones further away from the surface. So, a clock on the X-37B would move faster than one on the surface of the planet. Anyone who has seen Interstellar would be familiar with the phenomenon.
There is a good chance the data collected during the craft’s time spent orbiting the Earth will help in the development of existing GPS technologies. Satellites that measure position on Earth have to take these time differences into account in order to be accurate. Information is power, after all.
But what if there was an experiment that took place? Maybe the growth of quickly-proliferating cells, or numerous iterations of fruit flys testing the change in one gene. The payload of the spaceplane is classified but extrapolating the possibilities in this way could provide for some interesting story ideas.
In fact, this could explain the genesis of a pesticide-resistant crop, after it spent time on the orbiting craft, and after it’s reintroduced it takes over/chokes out native plants.
Or, perhaps more interesting, a supervirus that developed a resistance to anitbiotics. Zombie apocalypse anyone?
