December 8, 2023 at 9:30 AM Updated: [EXCLUSIVE: Become a News 6 Insider (it’s FREE) | PINIT! Share your photos] This launch will mark the first time an X-37B has hitched a ride on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, having used a United Launch Alliance Atlas V in its last jaunt. That was the spaceplane’s sixth mission — OTV-6, which launched in May 2020, lasted 908 days and landed last November — which was widely believed to have caused a stir in Central Florida when loud sonic booms were heard across the state early Nov. 12, 2022. Speculative social media posts began to crop up in the 5 a.m. hour that day, with a timestamp on one resident’s surveillance video suggesting the booms were heard at 5:17 a.m. Boeing went on to state that the X-37B officially landed at 5:22 a.m., offering no other information. As far as what’s been outright confirmed by OTV-6′s launch operators, the mission was the X-37B’s first to include a service module that made more experimentation possible than in previous excursions. The spacecraft carried the Naval Research Laboratory’s Photovoltaic Radio-frequency Antenna Module experiment, which transformed solar power into radio frequency microwave energy, and two NASA experiments to study the results of radiation and other space effects on a materials sample plate and seeds used to grow food. The X-37B Mission 6 also deployed FalconSat-8, a small satellite developed by the U.S. Air Force Academy and sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory. SAF/PA | Nov. 8, 2023