Bodhammer shares a report from Popular Mechanics: The U.S. Navy has jumped into the game by filing a patent for a compact fusion reactor, according to exclusive reporting by The War Zone. The success of the device, developed by researcher Salvatore Cezar Pais of the Naval Air Warfare Center -- Aircraft Division, relies on a part called a dynamic fusor. According to the patent, Pais' plasma chamber contains several pairs of these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in order to create a "concentrated magnetic energy flux" that can squish the gases together.

Coated with an electrical charge, the cone-shaped fusors pump fuel gases like Deuterium or Deuterium-Xenon into the chamber, which are then put under intense heat and pressure to create the nuclei-fusing reaction. Current technology at reactors around the world use superconductors to create a magnetic field. The War Zone reports that the device could potentially produce more than a terawatt of energy while only taking in power in the kilowatt to megawatt range.

"The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army's psychological warfare unit," reports Middle East Eye: The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as "information warfare". Carter says the 77th Brigade is giving the British military "the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level"; to shape perceptions of conflict. Some soldiers who have served with the unit say they have been engaged in operations intended to change the behaviour of target audiences.

What exactly MacMillan is doing with the unit is difficult to determine, however: he has declined to answer any questions about his role, as has Twitter and the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD).
Responding to the article, the British army told Newsweek their brigade had no relationship with Twitter, "other than using Twitter as one of many social media platforms for engagement and communication." And Twitter reminded Newsweek that "We proactively publish all tweets and accounts relating to state-backed foreign information operations on the service -- regardless of the source. We built this industry-leading archive to promote better public understanding of these threats." Despite the assertions of Twitter and the British military, academics and researchers have said the division between the two is not so clear. David Miller -- a professor of political sociology in the School for Policy Studies at England's University of Bristol, who studies propaganda and public relations efforts concerning the British government -- is one such academic. He told Newsweek he believes a link is there, adding that it was a "threat to our democracy."

"I would say I know a good amount about army propaganda and 'psyops' operations as they're called, but what is interesting is how little information we have 77th Brigade," he said." I suppose it means that all their work is covert, but what I would like to know is what they exactly are they doing? Are they just tracking accounts or are they trying to influence people's views? What we do know is that their account itself is hidden by Twitter so we assume they are trying to influence people under the operatives' own names. And because we know so little about exactly what they're doing, we have to look elsewhere for clues for example.
The professor also argues that Twitter is deceiving us by "not acting as transparently as it could. If they are working with army personnel in this way, it is extremely damaging to our democracy. Given Twitter's closure of accounts alleged to be used by foreign governments, it's a very hypocritical stance of Twitter to take."

The FBI is investigating after someone allegedly tried to hack into West Virginia's mobile voting app during the 2018 midterm elections. From a report: One or more people allegedly attempted to hack into Voatz, an experimental app that lets voters who are active military or registered to vote abroad cast their votes from their phones, Mike Stuart, the US attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, announced Tuesday. Stuart said in a statement that "there was no intrusion and the integrity of votes and the election system was not compromised," but that an investigation had begun, was "ongoing and no legal conclusions whatsoever have been made regarding the conduct of the activity or whether any federal laws were violated." West Virginia is the only state that currently allows for the system, though it's been used and is being considered in several cities and counties across the country.

"We just noticed a certain group of people from a certain part of the country tried to access the system. We stopped them, caught them and reported them to the authorities," Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney told CNN. "Somebody downloaded, registered and then tried to tamper with it, do something. We caught unauthorized activity, and they immediately got stopped," Sawhney said. He said he did not think the culprit was a sophisticated nation-state hacker looking to disrupt the election. Because Sawhney caught the activity last October, and elections are considered critical infrastructure, he felt he needed to report the incident to the FBI.

hackingbear writes: In a large military parade led by President Xi Jinping to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, China's military has shown off a new hypersonic ballistic nuclear missile believed capable of breaching all existing anti-missile shields deployed by the United States and its allies. The DF-17, as the new missile is known, uses hypersonic glide vehicle technology also permits it to fly on a highly manoeuvrable trajectory, at extremely fast speed, at a much lower altitude just before delivering its warhead, defeating attempts to detect and intercept the weapon. The DF-17 is believed to be the first of its kind to reach operation status. In addition to DF-17, China also showed off a number of new weapons including the first official revealing of DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, with a reach of between 12,000 and 15,000 kilometers (7,400-9,320 miles), reportedly the longest in the world.

OneHundredAndTen writes: According to this Forbes article, the Pentagon is worried that many in the USA's military nerve center claim to use Agile methods, when in fact, they aren't. Those responsible for these things at the Pentagon have therefore come up with a Detecting Agile BS document, so people can tell when they are doing Agile vs. when they are doing BS Agile. The implicit conclusion seems to be the usual "if it doesn't work for you, you are not doing it right."
The article was written by the author of The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done, a 2018 book arguing "An unstoppable business revolution is under way -- and it is Agile. Companies that embrace Agile Management learn to connect everyone and everything...all the time. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale." The book's author is Stephen Denning, who spent four years as Program Director of Knowledge Management during his decades of management at the World Bank.

His Forbes article this week warns "effective software development at DoD is not just a narrow issue affecting a few software developers. Questions of national cyber security and the integrity of the upcoming U.S. presidential election may depend on it... Fresh thinking and Agile mindsets are urgently needed."

German investigators say they have shut down a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities. Seven people were arrested. The Washington Post reports: Officials said Friday that the former military bunker in Traben-Trarbach, a picturesque town on the Mosel River in western Germany, was acquired in 2013 by a Dutch man who turned it into a heavily secured data processing center. Prosecutor Juergen Bauer said 13 people are under investigation, including three Germans and seven Dutch citizens. Seven were arrested in raids Thursday. They are suspected of membership in a criminal organization because of a tax offense, as well as being accessories to hundreds of thousands of offenses involving drugs, counterfeit money, forged documents and the distribution of child pornography.

An anonymous reader writes: Drone attacks, including the recent swarm strike in Saudi Arabia, are increasing, and so is the Pentagon's interest in killing them. This week, the Pentagon notified Congress of its purchase of a microwave weapon system designed to knock down swarms of enemy drones with pulses of energy. The purchase comes with an intent to deploy the PHASER system overseas for a year-long assessment, making it the first directed energy defense weapon to ever be fielded. The U.S. Air Force spent $16.28 million for one prototype PHASER high power microwave system for a "field assessment for purposes of experimentation" in an unspecified location outside the U.S. The test is "expected to be completed by Dec. 20, 2020," making the overseas deployment "against real-world or simulated hostile vignettes" imminent.

There are several directed energy weapons that the Air Force is buying to test their effectiveness in the field, and officials say some will be on the frontlines in tense areas of the globe where enemy drones are becoming a threat, includes North Korea, Africa, the Ukraine and -- most recently -- the Middle East. "At the moment we have awarded multiple DE systems for use in our field assessment overseas and are working to support multiple bases and areas of responsibility," says Michael Jirjis, who is lead on the PHASER experiment, told Popular Mechanics. "We can't say which specific locations at this time."

"The US military has been forced to apologise for tweeting that it would use stealth-bombers on 'millenials' who try to storm Area 51," reports Yahoo News UK: More than two million people signed up to a Facebook event recently which encouraged atendees to visit the top secret base in Nevada. But only a few thousand UFO enthusiasts turned up on Friday to the facility, which is rumoured to contain secrets about aliens. As hordes of enthusiasts turned up the PR arm of the US military, called the Defence Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), tweeted: "The last thing #Millennials will see if they attempt the #area51raid today" with a picture of military officers in front of a stealth bomber.

Shortly afterwards the tweet was deleted and the unit apologised saying it "in no way" reflects their stance... "It was inappropriate and we apologize for this mistake."

Around 1,000 people visited the facility's gates on Friday and at least six were arrested by police.

The Storm Area 51 invitation spawned festivals in the tiny nearby towns of Rachel and Hiko, more than two hours' drive from Las Vegas. Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee estimated late on Thursday that about 1,500 people had gathered at the festival sites, and more than 150 made the trip several additional miles on bone-rattling dirt roads to get within selfie distance of the gates.... "It's public land," the sheriff said. "They're allowed to go to the gate as long as they don't cross the boundary."
Most of the arrests were for "misdemeanor trespassing on base property," which carries a $1,000 fine, according to the article. "In the end, no one actually 'stormed' Area 51, although deputies in rural Nye County resorted to 'heated warnings' to disperse as many as 200 people," reports the Associated Press.

In another article the news service also quotes Lincoln County emergency services chief Eric Holt as saying resources had been mustered to handle up to 30,000 people and calling the low turnout a "best-case" scenario... Although there were two car crashes involving cows. "The cows died, but motorists weren't hurt."

The main festival apparently drew 3,000 attendees, while the rival "Area 51 Basecamp" festival sold just 500 tickets for their Friday concert, prompting them to cancel their Saturday concert altogether. Its promoter told the Associated Press, "It was a gamble financially. We lost."

"A former Google engineer who worked on the company's infamous military drone project has sounded a warning against the building of killer robots," reports Business Insider.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger quotes their report: Laura Nolan had been working at Google four years when she was recruited to its collaboration with the US Department of Defense, known as Project Maven, in 2017, according to the Guardian. Project Maven was focused on using AI to enhance military drones, building AI systems which would be able to single out enemy targets and distinguish between people and objects. Google canned Project Maven after employee outrage, with thousands of employees signing a petition against the project and about a dozen quitting in protest. Google allowed the contract to lapse in March this year. Nolan herself resigned after she became "increasingly ethically concerned" about the project, she said...

Nolan fears that the next step beyond AI-enabled weapons like drones could be fully autonomous AI weapons. "What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed," she said.... Although no country has yet come forward to say it's working on fully autonomous robot weapons, many are building more and more sophisticated AI to integrate into their militaries. The US navy has a self-piloting warship, capable of spending months at sea with no crew, and Israel boasts of having drones capable of identifying and attacking targets autonomously -- although at the moment they require a human middle-man to give the go-ahead.

Nolan is urging countries to declare an outright ban on autonomous killing robots, similar to conventions around the use of chemical weapons.

SpaceX "built its experimental spaceport in and around Boca Chica Village, a decades-old community of about 20 elderly residents," reports Business Insider.

But now "SpaceX is trying to buy as much of Boca Chica Village as it can and move people out...following an accidental brush fire, public-safety notices warning of the possibility for explosions, and a push to have the Federal Aviation Administration approve orbital-class launches with larger rockets." "When SpaceX first identified Cameron County as a potential spaceport location, we did not anticipate that local residents would experience significant disruption from our presence," the letter said. "However, it has become clear that expansion of spaceflight activities as well as compliance with Federal Aviation Administration and other public safety regulations will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption to residents of the Village... SpaceX is offering you three times the independently appraised fair market value of your property," the letter said. "The offer is good through two weeks from the date of this letter...."

For those who commit to a sale, SpaceX said it would cover closing and other real-estate costs. It also comes packaged with an additional perk. "SpaceX recognizes that your close proximity to its operations has offered a unique opportunity to experience at close-hand the development of what will be the world's most advanced rocket. In appreciation of your support, we will offer all residents of the Village who accept the purchase offer the opportunity to continue their connection with the development of Starship by extending an invitation to attend future private VIP launch viewing events that are unavailable to the public."
Homeowner Cheryl Stevens complained to CBS News that the company has encroached on their neighborhood. "They're behaving as if this is Cape Canaveral. And it's not. It's not a military base. It's just a regular neighborhood, and a public beach, and a state highway. And suddenly, because they're here, stop the presses. Everything has to change for SpaceX."

SpaceX issued the following statement to CBS News: "We are entering a new and exciting era in space exploration and Texas is playing an increasingly important role in our efforts to help make humanity multi-planetary.

"As we develop Starship -- the world's most advanced launch system ever -- we are listening and responding to our neighbors' concerns and are striving to minimize disruptions as much as possible. We are working closely with Cameron County to facilitate public safety and provide regular road and beach closure updates to the public through a telephone hotline and on Cameron County's website."

Hundreds of people arrived early Friday at a gate at the once secret Area 51 military base in Nevada at the time appointed by an internet hoaxster to "storm" the facility to see space aliens and at least two were detained by sheriff's deputies. From a report: The Storm Area 51 invitation spawned festivals in the tiny Nevada towns of Rachel and Hiko nearest the military site, and a more than two-hour drive from Las Vegas. The Lincoln county sheriff, Kerry Lee, estimated late Thursday that about 1,500 people had gathered at the festival sites and said more than 150 people also made the rugged trip several additional miles on bone-rattling dirt roads to get within selfie distance of the gates.

An Associated Press photographer said it wasn't immediately clear if a woman who began ducking under a gate and a man who urinated nearby were arrested after the crowd gathered about 3am Friday. Millions of people had responded to a June internet post calling for people to run into the remote US air force test site that has long been the focus of UFO conspiracy theories. "They can't stop all of us," the post joked. "Lets see them aliens." The military responded with stern warnings that lethal force could be used if people entered the Nevada Test and Training Range, and local and state officials said arrests would be made if people tried.

A Navy official has confirmed that recently released videos of unidentified flying objects are real, but that the footage was not authorized to be released to the public in the first place. From a report: Joseph Gradisher, the spokesman for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, confirmed to TIME that three widely-shared videos captured "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." Gradisher initially confirmed this in a statement to "The Black Vault" a website dedicated to declassified government documents. "The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena," Gradisher told the site.

He tells TIME that he was "surprised" by the press coverage surrounding his statement to the site, particularly around his classification of the incursions as "unidentifiable," but says that he hopes that leads to UAP's being "de-stigmatized." "The reason why I'm talking about it is to drive home the seriousness of this issue," Gradisher says. "The more I talk, the more our aviators and all services are more willing to come forward." Gradisher would not speculate as to what the unidentified objects seen in the videos were, but did say they are usually proved to be mundane objects like drones -- not alien spacecraft. "The frequency of incursions have increased since the advents of drones and quadcopters," he says. The three videos of UFOs were published by the New York Times and "To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science," a self-described "public benefit corporation" co-founded by Tom DeLonge, best known as the vocalist and guitarist for the rock band, Blink-182.

"Saudi Arabia has cut oil and gas production following drone attacks on two major oil facilities run by state-owned company Aramco..." reports the BBC. "TV footage showed a huge blaze at Abqaiq, site of Aramco's largest oil processing plant [the world's biggest oil producer], while a second drone attack started fires in the Khurais oilfield."

The Iran-aligned Houthi movement (fighting the Western-backed military coalition supporting Yemen's government) has claimed credit for the attacks. Slashdot reader dryriver shared this report from the BBC: Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said the strikes had reduced crude oil production by 5.7m barrels a day -- about half the kingdom's output. A Yemeni Houthi rebel spokesman said it had deployed 10 drones in the attacks...

In a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), Prince Abdulaziz said the attacks "resulted in a temporary suspension of production at Abqaiq and Khurais plants". He said that part of the reduction would be compensated for by drawing on Aramco's oil stocks. The situation was under control at both facilities, Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said, adding that no casualties had been reported in the attacks.
The BBC also notes that Saudi Arabia produces 10% of the world's crude oil, adding that "cutting this in half could have a significant effect on the oil price come Monday when markets open."

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he fired national security advisor John Bolton, saying on Twitter he had "disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions." From a report: But minutes later, Bolton in his own tweet said that he "offered to resign" Monday night -- and that Trump told him, "Let's talk about it tomorrow." Either way, Bolton's departure shocked Washington, D.C., and oil crude futures fell. Bolton, who was named national security advisor in March 2018, is a harsh critic of Iran, and has advocated military strikes against that oil-rich nation. "I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning," Trump said in a tweet. "I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week." Earlier this month, Bolton had accused China of stealing US technology to make a stealth fighter. On a visit to Ukraine last month, Bolton said an unnamed fifth-generation aircraft "looks a lot like the F-35, that's because it is the F-35. They just stole it."

Glenn S. Gerstell, the general counsel of the National Security Agency, writing at The New York Times: The threats of cyberattack and hypersonic missiles are two examples of easily foreseeable challenges to our national security posed by rapidly developing technology. It is by no means certain that we will be able to cope with those two threats, let alone the even more complicated and unknown challenges presented by the general onrush of technology -- the digital revolution or so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution -- that will be our future for the next few decades.

The digital revolution has urgent and profound implications for our federal national security agencies. It is almost impossible to overstate the challenges. If anything, we run the risk of thinking too conventionally about the future. The short period of time our nation has to prepare for the effects of this revolution is already upon us, and it could not come at a more perilous and complicated time for the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the other components of the intelligence community.

Gearing up to deal with those new adversaries, which do not necessarily present merely conventional military threats, is itself a daunting challenge and one that must be undertaken immediately and for at least the next decade or two. But that is precisely when we must put in place a new foundation for dealing with the even more profound and enduring implications of the digital revolution. That revolution will sweep through all aspects of our society so powerfully that our only chance of effectively grappling with its consequences will lie in taking bold steps in the relatively near term. In short, our attention must turn to a far more complex set of threats of multiple dimensions enabled by the digital revolution. While the potential consequences are less catastrophic than nuclear war, they are nonetheless deeply threatening in a range of ways we will have trouble countering.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Scraping a public website without the approval of the website's owner isn't a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an appeals court ruled on Monday. The ruling comes in a legal battle that pits Microsoft-owned LinkedIn against a small data-analytics company called hiQ Labs. HiQ scrapes data from the public profiles of LinkedIn users, then uses the data to help companies better understand their own workforces. After tolerating hiQ's scraping activities for several years, LinkedIn sent the company a cease-and-desist letter in 2017 demanding that hiQ stop harvesting data from LinkedIn profiles. Among other things, LinkedIn argued that hiQ was violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's main anti-hacking law.

This posed an existential threat to hiQ because the LinkedIn website is hiQ's main source of data about clients' employees. So hiQ sued LinkedIn, seeking not only a declaration that its scraping activities were not hacking but also an order banning LinkedIn from interfering. A trial court sided with hiQ in 2017. On Monday, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court agreed with the lower court, holding that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act simply doesn't apply to information that's available to the general public. [...] By contrast, hiQ is only scraping information from public LinkedIn profiles. By definition, any member of the public has authorization to access this information. LinkedIn argued that it could selectively revoke that authorization using a cease-and-desist letter. But the 9th Circuit found this unpersuasive. Ignoring a cease-and-desist letter isn't analogous to hacking into a private computer system. "The CFAA was enacted to prevent intentional intrusion onto someone else's computer -- specifically computer hacking," a three-judge panel wrote. The court notes that members debating the law repeatedly drew analogies to physical crimes like breaking and entering. In the 9th Circuit's view, this implies that the CFAA only applies to information or computer systems that were private to start with -- something website owners typically signal with a password requirement.

The court notes that when the CFAA was first enacted in the 1980s, it only applied to certain categories of computers that had military, financial, or other sensitive data. "None of the computers to which the CFAA initially applied were accessible to the general public," the court writes. "Affirmative authorization of some kind was presumptively required."

"As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce," reports The Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader shares excerpts from the report: Across industries, engineers are building atop work done a generation ago by designers of military drones. Whether it's terrestrial delivery robots, flying delivery drones, office-patrolling security robots, inventory-checking robots in grocery stores or remotely piloted cars and trucks, the machines that were supposed to revolutionize everything by operating autonomously turn out to require, at the very least, humans minding them from afar. Until the techno-utopian dream of full automation comes into effect -- and frankly, there's no guarantee that will ever happen -- there will be plenty of jobs for humans, just not ones their parents would recognize. Whether the humans in charge are in the same city or thousands of miles away, the proliferation of not-yet-autonomous technologies is driving a tiny but rapidly growing workforce.

Companies working with remote-controlled robots know there are risks, and try to mitigate them in a few ways. Some choose only to operate slow-moving machines in simple environments -- as in Postmates's sidewalk delivery -- so that even the worst disaster isn't all that bad. More advanced systems require 'human supervisory control,' where the robot or vehicle's onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn't dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator. For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same. Phantom Auto is betting the shift to remote operation might become an important means of employment for people who used to drive for a living. Other requirements for our remote-controlled future include "a tolerance for working for a lower wage, since remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets," the report adds.

"Another might be a youth spent gaming. When Postmates managers interview potential delivery-robot pilots like Diana Villalobos, they ask whether or not they played videogames in their youth. 'When I was a kid, my parents always said, 'Stop playing videogames!' But it came in handy,' she says."

Hackers working for the Chinese government have broken into telecoms networks to track Uighur travelers in Central and Southeast Asia, Reuters reported, citing two intelligence officials and two security consultants who investigated the attacks. From a report: The hacks are part of a wider cyber-espionage campaign targeting "high-value individuals" such as diplomats and foreign military personnel, the sources said. But China has also prioritized tracking the movements of ethnic Uighurs, a minority mostly Muslim group considered a security threat by Beijing. China is facing growing international criticism over its treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Members of the group have been subject to mass detentions in what China calls "vocational training" centers and widespread state surveillance. Beijing's alleged cyberspace attacks against Uighurs show how it is able to pursue those policies beyond its physical borders.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've spent much time thinking about the political divide in the United States, you've hopefully noted how bloody weird it is. Somehow, just about every topic that people want to argue about splits into two camps. If you visualize the vast array of topics you could have an opinion about as a switchboard full of toggles, it seems improbable that so many people in each camp should have nearly identical switchboards, but they do. This can even extend to factual issues, like science -- one camp typically does not accept that climate change is real and human-caused. How in the world do we end up with these opinion sets? And why does something like climate change start an inter-camp argument, while other things like the physics behind airplane design enjoy universal acceptance?

One obvious way to explain these opinions is to look for underlying principles that connect them. Maybe it's ideologically consistent to oppose both tax increases and extensive government oversight of pesticide products. But can you really draw a straight line from small-government philosophy to immigration attitudes? Or military funding? A new study by a Cornell team led by Michael Macy approaches these questions with inspiration from an experiment involving, of all things, downloading indie music. That study set up separate "worlds" in which participants checked out new music with the aid of information about which songs other people in their experimental world were choosing. It showed that the songs that were "hits" weren't always the same -- there was a significant role for chance, as a song that got trending early in the experiment had a leg up.

"An Air Force X-37B spaceplane just completed its 718th day in orbit, making it the longest mission yet for a secretive military test program," reports CNN: The US military has launched five uncrewed X-37B spaceplanes into orbit over the past decade, and each flight has been longer than its predecessor...

What is known is that the military is using the planes to develop reusable spaceflight technology. Officials don't necessarily want to reuse the same X-37B plane multiple times, but the Air Force designed the craft to try out new navigation systems as well as methods for reentering the Earth's atmosphere and for landing safely back on terra firma. The X-37B is also popular among space fans because of its unique design. The planes, which look like miniature space shuttles, launch into orbit atop powerful rockets and then break away to carry out their mission. When their duties are complete, they swoop back toward Earth and touch down horizontally on a runway, like a commercial airplane or space shuttle orbiter coming in for landing...

The current X-37B plane in orbit, called OTV-5, was launched to space in September 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The previous flight, for OTV-4, was 718 days long and ended in May 2017.