X-37 улетел 22.04.2010. Ждём посадки.

I've been writing about U.S. military space programs for about fifteen years now and I haven't figured the X-37B out. It just doesn't quite make sense. Either I'm missing something, or maybe the USAF has simply decided to spend a lot of money developing technology that has no obvious mission.
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The problem with that is the USAF didn't "inherit" this; they chose to do it. Total program cost is classified, but we do know that the Atlas rocket that they used cost on the order of $130+ million apiece (and I suspect a lot more than that). So figure that the launch costs alone were at least $300 million. Then there's operations costs and the costs of the vehicles. This program probably costs a billion dollars or more. That's a WAG on my part, but the USAF cannot fire a bottle rocket without spending a few hundred million.

That's the dilemma for the X-37B: if it is a test program, it is pretty expensive, and why the classification? So the cost and the classification imply that it's doing something important and useful, and what could that be?
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And again, why are wings required for such a mission?

The other downside is that this is a short lifetime spacecraft. So they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars for a mission that does not last a year.