March 8, 2011 07:01 am EDT

Boeing's new unmanned X-37B launches into orbit, won't come home until it finds Major Tom

Model X-37B might look familiar to you -- it was the name of an autonomous space vehicle that took flight just about a year ago, orbited for a whopping eight months, and then successfully returned to our planet all by itself. Now a new version of the X-37B has blasted off to hang outside of the atmosphere for a while. The spacecraft left Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41 down in Florida and hurtled to a low-Earth orbit with help of a Atlas V rocket. Boeing isn't saying exactly what it's doing up there, but we suspect this spaceship knows which way to go.

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