Slashdot Mirror
Air Force Spaceplane Readying For Launch
FleaPlus writes "The US Air Force is currently preparing for the launch of the secretive X-37B OTV-1 (Orbital Test Vehicle 1) spaceplane, which was transferred from NASA to DARPA back in 2004 when NASA opted to focus its budget on lunar exploration. The reusable unmanned spaceplane is set to launch in April on top of a commercial Atlas V rocket, orbit for up to 270 days while testing a number of new technologies, reenter the atmosphere, then land on auto-pilot in California."
How secretive can it be if the launch is posted on /.?
Every little step gets us closer...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Hmmm, an autonomous space vehicle capable of remaining in orbit for 270 days and then re-entering the atmosphere and performing a precision landing anywhere on the globe. I wonder what they're going to put in that 7 foot by 4 foot cargo hold?
What happened to all the international conventions on leaving the space unmilitarized?
That is what they aught to send up in that 7 foot by 4 foot cargo hold!
Finally, that captured alien craft is being used.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While it is nice that this will give the Air Force a means of getting an expensive payload up into orbit and back down again quickly and safely (like onto a runway as opposed to a parachute landing on the ground or at sea) it really doesn't help the overall problem of making access to LEO significantly cheaper. Remember when you're in LEO, you're halfway to anywhere (I forget who said that quote but from the viewpoint of orbital energistics it is true).
Now that the Obama administration has (hopefully) set us on the right course by FIRST developing the technologies to get us into space, THEN trying to get somewhere, now maybe would be a time to revisit some abandoned ideas. Like the X-34 (I think it was called "Venture Star") using a deltoid lifting body with an aerospike engine it promised to make SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) possible. Or the "Delta Clipper" a vertical takeoff and vertical landing rocket, I think they got to 1/4 scale.
While I don't know if the "Delta Clipper" was fatally flawed (I think one of its landing struts collapsed), I heard that the problem with the "Venture Star" was they simply couldn't make the (then) state of the art composite fuel tanks work. So has material science improved enough to make it feasible? Or do we have to wait until "magic" carbon nano-tubes can make eggshells seem like horribly efficient containers?
An Air Force General once said: "A new plane doesn't make a new engine possible, a new engine makes a new plane possible." That's why the aerospike engine had such promise because it automatically adapted to the changing surrounding air pressure to keep the "nozzle" shape efficient. That (with new and improved) fuel tanks, just might make SSTO possible which, aside from space elevators or air breathing hypersonic space planes, is the only way we'll REALLY bring down the cost of getting into orbit.
Check your internet conne*NO CARRIER*
It saddens me deeply to see the Air Force space program advancing at the expense of our civil space program.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I think you'll find that IS the 7 foot by 4 foot cargohold.
Some bad guys plan their activities around known satellite "blank" times, when there is no overhead birds taking a look. Having the randomness in it makes it a bit harder to do so.
..........FULL STOP.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
If you check out the photos on Wikipedia of X-37B underneath the Rutan lift vehicle, you can see what looks like a flagpole sticking out of the nose. This spike is retracted at launch and extended prior to re-entry. The purpose of the spike is to create the leading sonic boom (hypersonic bow wave) and transonic region during re-entry -- well in front of the vehicle itself. The atmosphere reaching the wings and thermal protection surfaces is much slower than the hypersonic bow wave -- thus less heating occurs on the fuselage than on the spike.
The retractable/extensible spike absorbs such an enormous amount of energy and transforms it into heat, yet the spike is not very massive. In order to dissipate the heat without transferring it to the fuselage or melting in an uncontrolled manner, the spike is designed to ablate like many heat shields have (e.g. Apollo). "Ablate" means that the spike flakes apart in a controlled manner which leaves behind useful which continues to be the interface between the craft and the hypersonic flow.
The spike is shown extended in the re-entry test photo because the vehicle was configured for re-entry.
Before GWB scuttled Al Gore's X-38 ISS re-entry vehicle, there had been some talk of incorporating the ablative re-entry spike into ISS return craft. It appeared from the outside (I'm not an insider) that the military community in the US was getting paranoid that revealing the secret ablative spike technology to the foreign competition.
So does that mean that the USA have finally caught up with the Buran?
The Russian Buran project may not have made it into production but at least the first test launch was not manned and the craft was able to take of and land with no crew on board.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Interesting, it looks like the USAF is finally getting free of the shuttle boondoggle they got caught up in. Also interesting, it seems like they still want return from orbit capabilities (which vastly complicated the shuttle in many ways).
More rationally they are making it unmanned instead of shackling it with people.
Unfortunately being purely military we will hear a lot less about it's real capabilities....
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Sorry, at $20 million (more now I think) per passenger to orbit, I don't think Soyuz capsules are THAT cheap. We really need one of the technologies discussed before to lower costs a factor of ten (ideally a factor of a hundred).
I still think just getting to orbit cheaply is THE main hurdle. Once you're there (and again, if getting there is cheap enough so you don't have to sweat every last ounce/gram), there are lots of things you can try. Like VASIMIR or magnetic "bubbles" being pushed by the solar wind (not the same thing as a solar sail) or nuclear thermal. If getting to orbit was cheap enough so you could build life support with 2x (or more) redundancy or just bring up SCUBA tanks maybe it would make designing/building space craft easier. Cheap orbital access? Okay then we can protect ourselves against cosmic rays by shielding our spaceships with WATER (and give the astronauts a really fun zero-g pool to use on the trip).
Think how much easier space travel would be if the costs were something like that to resupply our base in Antarctica. I mean they have ATMs and (I think) a McDonalds! (Okay I'm dreaming now, maybe that won't come about until we had a space elevator).
It's not an orbital WMD platform, that would be against the treaty. It's just a plane..which can stay in orbit for most of a year...and drop a nuke anywhere in the world, at any time. Totally different thing.