The United States seeks to connect the F-35 stealth jet to the X-37B spacecraft – DEFENSE AND INTELLIGENCE

The chief of staff of the General Air Force, General David Goldfein, announced last week to the participants of the Air Force Association that the service's efforts to improve the transmission of information between service members and platforms could one day transcend the boundaries of the Land.

"The most important job is to lay the digital foundations – it's a step you can't skip," Goldfein said last Wednesday, as reported by Air Force magazine. "If you want to get artificial intelligence, if you want to make that hypersonic work, if you want to go to defensible space, if you want to get direct energy where it needs to go, if you want to go into quantum (computing), you can't actually skip the steps of building digital architecture and advancing the cloud architecture of common data ".

General David Kumashiro, director of the integration of the armed forces of the Air Force and deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, has expanded the comments of the chief of staff in a DefenseOne Outlook event and observed that the data transmitted through that connection would be more than likely to be used to improve aeronautics combat efforts and situational awareness. He also revealed which aircraft are awaiting initial consideration.

"When you look at something like an X-37 or an F-35 or F-22 … as we perfect these connections and show that level of interoperability that is resilient, redundant and reliable, we will then be able to develop what it means in terms of of creating an effect against the opponent, "reported Kumashiro quoted by Military.com.

Although the X-37 program has been active since 1999, NASA handed it over to the Agency for Advanced Pentagon Defense Research Projects (DARPA) in 2004. Not long after the X-37A space plan completed its first captive transport flight in 2005, DARPA then transferred the project to the Air Force, which began developing the X-37B, which is the last known variant to date.

Although much information regarding the X-37B spacecraft is classified, on 27 October it completed its fifth mission of the orbital test vehicle after spending a record 780 days in orbit.

After its most recent landing, the space plane program spent 2,865 days in orbit, according to the Air Force.

Preston Dunlap, chief architect of the Air Force, further explained to the participants of the DefenseOne event that communication between the X-37B and other invisible aircraft would allow the service to see "an image of space and air, of the surface terrestrial and cyber ".

"You can see an image, you can click on the ship, see where it was, where it is traveling, what's on the ship … and we need to be able to get it to our combat jets in an accessible way", he added.

While the Air Force seeks to integrate spatial communication into its modernization efforts, China has made progress in developing a space plane and recently announced that its spacecraft has successfully completed a wind tunnel experiment.

It is not known whether the Air Force's data sharing concept will include the US Space Force – a space warfare branch proposed under the Trump administration that is separate from the US aeronautical space command and US space command.