Air Force's Mysterious X-37B Space Plane to Launch Next Week

Okay. This gave me a laugh. Now, I may be wrong, but the X37B looks a helluva lot like the drawings that I saw of the proposed Space Shuttle. Then, as I understand the story, the military put in their two cents. They began specifying their requirements for payloads that forced NASA to redesign the Space Shuttle, making it ever larger, more costly, and more expensive. Ultimately, they ended up with a vehicle that never delivered on its original design criteria to provide for inexpensive and quick turnaround launches. Now we are without a Space Shuttle and paying the Russians to provide taxi and freight service for us until private US companies step up to the task and the military now is providing for its own vehicle which, as I began, looks a lot like the one NASA wanted to build before the military got involved. Stranger and stranger...