OTV-2
uncrewed spaceflight mission; first flight of the second Boeing X-37B
OTV-2 (also known as USA-226) was the first flight of the second Boeing X-37B, an American unmanned robotic vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing spaceplane. It was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on 5 March 2011, and landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base on 16 June 2012. It operated in low Earth orbit. Its USA-226 mission designation is part of the USA series.
The spaceplane was operated by Air Force Space Command, which has not revealed the specific identity of the payload for the first flight. The Air Force stated only that the spacecraft would "demonstrate various experiments and allow satellite sensors, subsystems, components, and associated technology to be transported into space and back."
Launch
OTV-2 was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket, tail number AV-026, on 5 March 2011 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It was scheduled to launch on the previous day, 4 March, but weather prevented the launch on that day, forcing the reschedule to 5 March.
The launch was conducted by United Launch Alliance.
The X-37B spacecraft was originally intended to be deployed from the payload bay of a NASA Space Shuttle, but following the Columbia accident, it was transferred to a Delta II 7920, then subsequently transferred to the Atlas V following concerns over the X-37B's aerodynamic properties during launch.
Prior to the installation of the spacecraft, the Atlas rocket was moved to the launch pad and performed a wet dress rehearsal on 4 February 2011.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “OTV-2” is uncrewed spaceflight mission; first flight of the second Boeing X-37B. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through OTV-2, uncrewed and spaceflight, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7865685. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “OTV-2” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.