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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."
Buran flew in 1988. Maybe it was autonomous. And then sat in a warehouse until the building collapsed from lack of maintenance, destroying Buran. I guess this is no worse than spacecraft rusting out in museum parking lots in the U.S.
Bruce Perens.
Here's the space shuttle we lost, OK at 1/4 scale, but without the triple redundancy because it doesn't have to carry people. It can do the missions.
The future of space, at least in the near term, doesn't look so great for astronauts.
I wonder if it would scale up to shuttle size?
Bruce Perens.
The first re-usable nuclear missle :-)
X-37 is, like the shuttle, meant to soft-land and be re-used. Nuclear missles are meant to get somewhere really fast and avoid anti-ballistic missles, and blow themselves up. Not really the X-37 mission.
It's for spy satellites, among other things. Nuclear missles can get anywhere in two hours already.
Bruce Perens.
Exactly! I took over 20 years for american military scientist to decipher Buran's documentation and clone the technology. This again proves my theory that the cyrylic alphabet is best cipher out there!
The only Buran flight was done without a crew, and it was autonomous - the only one to fly was destroyed, but there were another one which was nearly complete which survives, and another three in production, of which two survive. The USSR
Uhhh, the USA, France, Britain, Russia and China can already drop a nuclear bomb on anyone, anywhere on earth, within about 10 minutes.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
And undoubtedly it's also the easiest alphabet with which to spell "cyrillic?"
Is the podbay big enough to hold Chinese or Russian satellites and bring them back down again? That seems to me what is really going on here - why otherwise would the USAF really care about getting stuff back down again? - they don't need their own satellites back - let them burn up in reentry - they are not collecting particulate matter, and I don't believe they will be going around hoovering up space junk. If the thing can stay up therewith it's solar panels for 270 days, maybe it is just wandering around picking up "rogue" satellites, attaching small engines and letting the satellites deorbit.
Does anyone know what the panels lining the rocket fairing are for?
http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/scitech/2009/10/22/nasas-secret-space-plane-nears-maiden-voyage?slide=4
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
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.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Yup. There is a foreign submarine bearing a nuclear bomb armed missile or three, off your coast right now...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yup. There is a foreign submarine bearing a nuclear bomb armed missile or three, off your coast right now...
My country doesn't have a coast, you insensitive clod!
Hmm, but many people don't realize why the doomsday clock has been stuck at about 6 minutes to midnight for half a century. Its time is not quite as arbitrary as most would like to hope.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
While much of the internal and mission design requirements where different, it's clear that they took the external shape of the Shuttle and modeled it very, very closely. Yes, there are only a couple of ways you can make a hypersonic fuselage of a certain size, but the Russians could have used several other design complexes (for example, the 'V' tail configuration of the XB-37) instead of looking exactly like the Shuttle.
The fact that the Russians repurposed the Buran-Mir docking collar to fit the shuttles also indicates a high degree of structural similarity.
Did they steal the data or just used the fact that the US had done extensive tests on 'that' configuration and thus not re inventing the wheel would gain time and save money? Who knows?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!