USAF's Robotic X-37B Orbiter Launched For Test Flight

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "The United States Air Force's novel robotic X-37B space plane is tucked inside the bulbous nose cone of an unmanned rocket that blasted off Thursday from Florida on a mission shrouded in secrecy. ... The unmanned military Orbital Test Vehicle 1 (OTV-1) — also known as the X-37B — lifted off at 7:52 pm EDT atop an Atlas 5 rocket on a mission that is expected to take months testing new spacecraft technologies. ... Key objectives of the space plane's first flight include demonstration and validation of guidance, navigation, and control systems – including a 'do-it-itself' autonomous re-entry and landing at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base with neighboring Edwards Air Force Base as a backup."

Comments

Re:Wasn't the Buran autonomous...?

[toxygen01]

The two surviving are OK-GLI and OK-TVA.
The former one was used for atmospherical tests, i.e. it had mounted 4 jet engines (from SU-27) and could take-off and land autonomously.
Out of 25 flights, 14 were completely autonomous including landing.
Last weekend we went to see OK-GLI locate in Speyer in Germany. Photos can be seen here:
on picasa

Re:Wasn't the Buran autonomous...?

[rxmd]

It was no coincidence that the Buran looks exactly like the Space Shuttle. It was a duplicate copy.

Actually it was not. The two looked similar because at the time there were only so many ways to build an orbiter, but on the technical level they are pretty fundamentally different. The most important difference is that the Space Shuttle is basically its own rocket, while Buran only had small engines for maneuvering, while launch was done by an Energia booster. Since it did not have to be built around a big engine, Buran is completely different structurally.

As a result, the Buran had a greater payload capacity (theoretical, as it was never tested with a payload) and a better glide number, but you needed a big rocket (theoretically reusable) every time you wanted to launch it. In other words, two fundamentally different approaches to the same technical problem.