James Dean

Florida Today

MELBOURNE, Fla. — NASA has confirmed plans for a secretive military space plane program to take over the use of two former shuttle hangars at Kennedy Space Center.

The Air Force's X-37B program will occupy the hangars, known as Orbiter Processing Facilities 1 and 2, which are connected to each other.

The partnership "ensures the facilities will again be used for their originally intended purpose — processing spacecraft," NASA said Wednesday in a press release. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

An Air Force spokesman was unavailable for comment Wednesday afternoon.

The Boeing Co., which operates two re-usable, unmanned X-37B space planes, in January announced plans for the program to use Orbiter Processing Facility 1.

The Air Force did not comment then but had previously confirmed it was studying potential savings from consolidating X-37B operations, housed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, near their Cape Canaveral launch site. The program's budget is classified.

Kennedy Space Center officials unofficially acknowledged that the other hangar was also part of the deal.

NASA on Wednesday said renovations of the two hangars are expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Painted blue doors on one of the hangars already tout it as "Home of the X-37B," marketing visible to passing tour buses.

NASA said the program had also completed testing to confirm the space planes, which are 29 feet long with with wingspans of nearly 15 feet — or about one-fourth the size of a space shuttle orbiter — could land on Kennedy's former shuttle runway.

Two X-37B Orbital Test Vehicles have launched and landed since 2010. The first vehicle launched on its second mission nearly two years ago and remains in orbit.

The X-37B's mission is unknown. Speculation has envisioned it serving as everything from a sensor platform to a satellite deployer or repair vehicle to a system for attacking satellites or ground targets.

The Air Force describes it simply as a demonstration program for testing re-usable space vehicle technologies.