Secretive Air Force X-37B Aircraft Moves To Florida's Kennedy Space Center

The highly secretive X-37B space plane has been moved to a shuttle hangar at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., which could bring hundreds of jobs to the area, according to a Florida Today report.

The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA)-built craft is being moved into the Orbiter Processing Facility-1, which will allow the Air Force “to efficiently land, recover, refurbish and re-launch,” the newspaper said Sunday.

It is thought that the move will bring 200 jobs initially before building up to 550 jobs -- assuming Boeing wins a contract to use it to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.

The unmanned craft originally started off life as a NASA project but was moved to the Defense Department in 2004. It conducted its first flight in April 2006 and has since made several trips into space.

NASA is currently in talks with SpaceX to take over one of its two space pads and with Space Florida to take over the three-mile runway.