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Air Force Spaceplane Readying For Launch

Posted by Soulskill on from the pushing-baby-shuttles-from-the-nest dept.

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."

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Secretive Space Plane? by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How secretive can it be if the launch is posted on /.?

  2. Re:Cool! by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The existence of this project seems to demonstrate that a lot of people didn't learn anything from the Space Shuttle.

    The problem with the Shuttle was not that it had wings. The problem with the Shuttle was that it was designed (and redesigned, and redesigned ...) to be all things to all people. I guarantee you, if the Saturn V had been built the way the Shuttle was, it would have cost ten times as nuch and been lucky to get a tenth of the way to the Moon.

    The lesson to be learned from the Shuttle is not "don't build spaceplanes," but rather "don't try to build one single vehicle for every mission that NASA, the Air Force, commercial operators, and my cousin's dog might possibly want to perform in space."

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.