Mysterious X-37B unmanned space shuttle launched by U.S. ... and they won't say what it's for Read

Source: mail online

It looks like the space shuttle's more diminutive cousin - but experts say it was created with technology from a generation beyond.

The U.S. military launched the mysterious X-37B unmanned winged spacecraft last night - but what America plans to do with it there is anyone's guess.

The mission has been wrapped in secrecy from the get-go. The Air Force said the launch was a success but would give no details of the mission's progress.

'Well, you can't hide a space launch, so at some point extra security doesn't do you any good,' said Gary Payton, Air Force deputy under secretary for space systems, in a Tuesday teleconference with reporters.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1268138/X-37B-unmanned-space-shuttle-launched-tonight.html#ixzz0lt4e7vAu


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1268138/X-37B-unmanned-space-shuttle-launched-tonight.html

X-37B?

On the other hand Obama might be in the same position as Jimmy Carter who canceled the first B-1 because the most secret R&D project that produced the F-117 was within months of completion.

My father was in one the SAC evaluation teams which basically told Rockwell to stick that piece of garbage up where the sun don't shine. It was one of the most spectacular wastes of tax payer money up to that point. No wonder Rumsfeld thought of it as one of his personal pet projects (My dad actually has a picture of Rumsfeld with him when he visited Edwards, little did he know how much he would come to loathe that guy 3 decades later, but even then he gave indications of being an utter prick according to my old man, I don't know in what capacity Rumsfeld was serving with the pentagon in the mid 70s but he was overseeing some programs back then).

A lot of people, who actually were doing the right thing, had their careers in the pentagon ended the minute Raygun become president. The military contractors sent a clear signal that anyone who fucks with them inside the pentagon will pay dire consequences, now that a MiC friendly admin was in charge. And thus, witness the insane amount of useless programs Raygun brought forth. The B-1 took almost 3 decades to become fully functional, and meet the basic specs set for it in the late 60s. The US was able to build the atomic bomb in 1/10th of the time than it took for the B-1 to fly correctly.

He wasn't just overseeing some programs, he was running the whole Defense department.

And perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. The F-117 and the B-1 (A or B models) were designed for very different roles: tactical attack/strike versus strategic strike. An F-117 can't carry nearly as much nearly as far nor nearly as fast as a B-1A. The ONLY thing it had going for it over the B-1A was first generation stealth tech. To say the B-1A was canx for the F-117 implies the F-117 was going to have a strategic role and would be a SAC asset like the FB-111A, which was never the intention and was never the case -- the F-117 just can't go far enough to make it useful in anything but the most limited strategic strike role. Did you perhaps mean B-1A versus B-2?

versions obsolete.

We built 100 sets of parts and that was the end of it. Production was shut down before the first production plane (B-1B) was built.

When the last plane came off the line, the tooling was destroyed.

Ain't no way the Air Force is giving that up. This was a canceled NASA project the Air Force picked up.

But what do ya bet it can carry a cargo of humans?

A mini-shuttle makes good sense.

The previous photoreconaissance satellites were either large (KH-11) or limited in capability (Corona).

This one could be launched with a smaller rocket than the KH series, and landed back fairly quickly (with some interesting
photos, no doubt).

There was a reason why the Keyholes were big - physics of telescopes dictate that if you want a good image, you need a big mirror, and the Keyhole was essentially a telescope roughly equivalent to the Hubble Space Telescope, only designed to be pointed at Earth.

Maybe they could do it smaller with newer satellites - instead of a huge glass mirror, maybe a unfoldable mirror made of thin foil, that's dynamically adjustable for better focusing capability.

Do bear in mind that the X-37B is not that big - the payload bay is about 7 feet long.

I'd guess that the Air Force had anti-satellite technology in mind...

I think that's where it is headed.

That's the rumor I'm starting;

The United States Air Force plans to launch its first robotic X-37B space plane Thursday on a mission that is a forerunner of things to come. A second mini-space plane is already under contract and is projected to be launched next year.

New details regarding the mini-space plane and its upcoming Thursday liftoff atop an Atlas 5 booster were discussed today during a U.S. Air Force-held media press briefing.

The X-37B vehicle's history stretches back to the late 90s, with NASA kick-starting the project. It was later picked up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and ultimately found a home within the Air Force. The project is now under the wing of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.

"After a tumultuous history of sponsorship, it's great to see the X-37 finally get to the launch pad and get into space," said Gary Payton, U.S. Air Force Deputy Under Secretary for Space Programs in a media press briefing today.


http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/x-37b-robot-space-plane-launch-100420.html

I KNEW they EXISTED!!!

And I see no frikkin laser beam on its head. :D

If the day comes that we go to a hot war with another nation, this guy will be knocking out the enemy's communication and imagery satellites.

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Like Iran????

due to the very real problem of collisional cascading. Once that happens, we can forget getting into orbit with anything, manned or otherwise, for a very long time.

If you blast an enemy satellite, you make your own space-based operations impossible....

...to spread chemtrails call 1-800-Bilderberger! They pay amazingly well.

No problems sending up weather and telecom sats on foreign launch platforms, but the Pentagon isn't going to want to hand a top secret reconnaissance satellite or star wars component over to the Kremlin or ESA and hope they don't peek at it.

Its cargo bay is too small to fit most satellites. They can just put a satellite on top of the Atlas V booster anyway, they don't need the X-37B for that.

I'm willing to bet we will be seeing larger versions of this thing in the future.

You don't put a satellite in a vehicle like this and then put it on another launch vehicle. And no our military has a lot of launch options.

Which was tested at the same time:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/world/europe/23strike.html

Reuters via ABC News: "U.S. Military Tests X-37B Reusable Spaceship"
Sydney Morning Herald: "Secret of the X-37B - it's out of this world"

and my 1000th post.

:grr:

The Secretary of the Air Force states the OTV program will focus on "risk reduction, experimentation, and operational concept development for reusable space vehicle technologies, in support of long term developmental space objectives."

OTV is Orbital Test Vehicle which is Air Force name for the X-37B project.

My SWAG is that OTV is just that a test platform so Air Force can experiment with reduced scale designs at lower cost.
The one thing I do know is this isn't for launching spy sats. You don't need a reusable orbiter to launch sats.

It may be more manueverable than our normal spy sats. It may be planned as a spy sat on demand. You put it up for 5-9 months blow all the fuel moving around in orbit, bring it down and then refuel it. Now it's mostly dead weight so there only so much "working" material you can put up. But I imagine someone knows exactly what they can and can't get into the thing and if it's worth the limit capability. It could be used to augment current satellites in a very limit capacity role.

:shrug:

:shrug:

military industrial complex activities.

The X-37B carries a payload...and that payload certainly isn't a satellite. The military has been increasingly relying on drones....the X-37B is unmanned.

This idea is 60 years old:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel

NASA originally developed it as a reconfigurable space testing platform. The advantage of this type of arrangement is that it can be reconfigured to do just about anything. A cloak of secrecy was dropped over it when the project was transferred to DARPA, but there are two leading theories that have been discussed for years.

1. A quick launch spy satellite platform. Since the retirement of the Blackbird, it's been pointed out many times that spy sats have serious drawbacks. They can only view things beneath their orbits, and it can take days to move them from one orbit to another. This is a huge problem when you need quick images of a previously unmonitored area. Mounting one this way would permit the military to launch new spy sats whenever they want, into any orbit they need, and recall it when its done.

2. Think "global drone" that can sit in orbit and wait for orders. Potentially for weeks or years.

Of course, the second option would grossly violate the Space Treaty of 1967.

It has been around for several years, is being used as a test bed for military spacecraft. It is made by Boeing, and there also was an X-40, which was retired.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

There are many more references to it on Google if anyone would want to look.
The basic technology has been around since the 1990's.
This is just improving on that design.

m